Energy infrastructure

That's capitalism nothing to do with being green. Regulator sets a maximum price gas can be sold at. IMHO any company that didn't hedge their bets against costs going above that was trading recklessly.

UK govt has given them a £1.69 Bn loan to keep going. As this is £1,000 per customer it would take years to make it back, esp since it's likely to go up to £2.1bn by the end of the UK tax year. (About 90% of the UK's energy companies are expected to leave the market by then.)

But the important thing is the shareholders got paid in other years. And they won't have to swallow the billions in costs.

https://www.doosanfuelcell.com/en/prod/prod-0102/ PureCellⓇ Model 400 Hydrogen 440KW Electrical efficiency 50% ( +35% Heat if using for CHP ) - the PureCell that runs on natural gas is 45% electrical efficiency

The best combined cycle gas turbines are 60% so for grid scale you might as well burn Hydrogen as is. Gas turbines don't run cleanly on things that leave deposits on the blades like powdered coal or boron fuels (zip fuel). But other than that they'll run on most fluid fuels whose combustion products are gases. During the cold war they even tried using the heat from a nuclear reactor instead of combustion to heat air.

For long distances flights the weight of the fuel can weigh as much as everything else so you have to use light atoms (more chemical bonds per kg) which that limits what can be used. Hydrogen is too bulky even if you use it as a very hard to handle liquid. Lithium and Lithium Hydride are solids so hard to get into a turbine. Lithium Oxide is also a solid so hard to get out of a turbine. Beryllium is the same but is also extremely toxic. Then there's Boron which is a solid but also has a family of hydrides all of which ignite in contact with air and leave glassy deposits all over the engine, and are also extremely toxic. Nitrogen is inert, but with hydrogen it can be made into ammonia which is hard to ignite and toxic and corrosive, you could use hydrazine as a fuel but it's way nastier and doesn't need air to burn or explode. Fluorine, no just no. Yes you can make a high density liquid with chlorine such as chlorine trifloride or chlorine pentafluoride but they are the closest things we have to universal solvents and that is the least of the problems. Most of the next line on the periodic table are solids whose oxides are also solids so not much use in a gas turbine except for sulphur dioxide which is a gas we don't want to add to the atmosphere.

So you are left with hydrocarbons and slightly less energy dense variations with oxygen too like alcohols and other biofuels.

Removing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere is a huge waste of energy IMHO, compared to capturing it at source. It's measured in ppm. https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2021/sep/09/worlds-biggest-plant-to-turn-carbon-dioxide-into-rock-opens-in-iceland-orca captures 4,000 tonnes of CO2 a year. Call it $80 a tonne. The plant is worth €320,000 a year. It cost $15m to build. Payback time is 47 years ignoring all running costs.

Stop picking one off incidents and using them to construct bogus and dishonest images of unreliability:

Long report on the state of nuclear here - have a look at France - Page 87 onwards (other countries also have problems)

Nuclear is not dependable. The virtues promoted are it being on 24/7 for long times. The problem is not just that output can fall to zero without notice if there is an unplanned incident, it's also that you can't rely on nuclear to come back on line , on time.

Unavailabilities at zero power affecting the French nuclear fleet reached a total of 6,475 reactor-days, an average of 115.5 days per reactor. All of the 56 reactors were affected, with cumulated outages between 3.5 days and the full year.

NB. this 4 month offline per reactor did not include times when output dropped but stayed above zero because heat or drought affected cooling. (to be pedantic Flamanville-3 was due to start in 2012 now delayed to 2024 so it's really 6840 reactor-days or 120 days x 57 reactors)

On 13 days 50% (28/56) of the reactors were down for at least part of the day. 20 (over 1/3rd) units were down simultaneously for 158.5 days (43% of the year). Extensions to planned outages increased the average downtime by 44% but were still considered "Planned" by EDF

You can't have safe and reliable nuclear power cheaply. If you spend the money to do it right it's uneconomic today and predictably insanely uneconomic over the future life of the plant.

Since 2009 the cost changes are : nuclear +34%, coal +1%, gas -29%, wind -70%, solar -90%

The lowest awarded contracts for Spain's 3GW of renewable were €15/MWh solar (€20/MWh for onshore wind). That's an eight of the current Hinkley strike price of £106.12 (€125.07) so a hydrogen pipeline to the UK doesn't sound crazy ?

https://www.powermag.com/how-much-will-hydrogen-based-power-cost/

Energy cost of €15/MHw should mean hydrogen at €1.02/Kg , transport of €0.21/kg per 1,000km so €1.23/kg which pro-rata works out at €61.5/MWh £52.1) (Shortest distance Spain - UK is 500km and use lower pumping cost / volume of scale to get €1.07/Kg ~ €53.5MWh £45.3)

There's 1.65GW of hydro but wind provides four times as much power. 19.7 TWh from onshore wind, 3.5TWh offshore, Hydro is 5.9 TWh others 2.7TWh

Exports were 19.3TWh vs imports of 1.1TWh which gives an idea of how much we could have been exporting, and an idea of the surplus power that could be stored.

They've 14GW of mostly wind in the pipeline too