Britain’s first new nuclear plant in a generation at the Hinkley Point C site will face further delay, at a cost of €2.5bn to the French utility company EDF.
EDF said the first reactor at the site in Somerset will begin operations in 2030, a year later than planned – almost 13 years after construction work began – after a series of delays to the project.
The latest delay will wipe almost £3bn from the French state-owned developer’s accounts and take the total cost of building the nuclear plant to £35bn, or almost double the estimate of £18bn when it was given the green light in 2016. However, the final cost will be far higher once inflation is taken into account as EDF gives its cost estimates in 2015 prices.
The chief executive of EDF, Bernard Fontana, said the new forecasts were “more realistic” and added the 2030 startup was “within a range that has not changed” since 2024, when it said operations would start between 2029 and 2031.
Once operational, Hinkley Point is expected to generate about 7% of Britain’s electricity demand. EDF’s successor project at Sizewell C in Suffolk is expected to generate enough electricity to power the equivalent of 6m British homes.
UK energy bill payers are expected to pay more than £2bn a year in subsidies to EDF for the electricity generated at the nuclear plants once they are online. The fixed price is subject to a government contract, meaning it will not rise to cover an increase in costs.
The first new nuclear plants to be built in the UK since the 1990s are considered a central plank in the government’s plan to reduce reliance on fossil fuels to meet its legally binding climate targets.
But the projects have faced criticism by running over time and over budget. EDF’s only other nuclear project using the same reactor type, at Flamanville in France, reached full operations in December after a delay of more than 12 years, in which costs ballooned from an initial estimate of €3.3bn to more than €13.2bn.
The one-year delay at Hinkley Point contributed to a slump in full-year earnings for EDF, which is under financial pressure as it prepares to start construction on six new reactors in France, and complete the Sizewell C project – where it holds a 12.5% stake.
The company reported full-year earnings of just over €29bn for 2025, down sharply from €36bn the year before. The decline was due primarily to a fall in generation across the UK, France and Italy, combined with lower wholesale market prices.
EDF’s full-year earnings from generating electricity in the UK fell by a third from the year before to €2.3bn after longer unplanned outages, particularly at its Hartlepool nuclear plant, and a busier maintenance programme combined with lower market prices.
