The U.K. government has picked its preferred type of small nuclear reactor for a £170 million demonstration program. Alongside electricity, this type of reactor can produce clean hydrogen and heat. Britain’s decision to explore advanced modular reactor technology comes days after plans for new, large-scale plants were thrown into doubt.

The government is committed to shutting down the country’s three nuclear plants over the next decade or so. Switzerland will lose a third of its current energy generation and become more dependent on imported energy, just as it faces the growing risk it may decouple from the EU’s electricity grid thanks to an increasingly fractious diplomatic tussle with Brussels.

The government plan includes a potential nationalization of EDF’s nuclear and hydropower activities, along with a stock-market listing of a minority stake for its wind, solar, electricity distribution and retail business. The new publicly traded entity would be able to consider a “significant capital increase as soon as it’s listed” and to sell bonds to finance projects.

Five of the advanced gas-cooled reactor (AGR) plants are due to be shut down in the next three years, removing more than 5.2GW of the current 8.9GW of the UK's nuclear energy capacity. Only one new plant is under construction, the 3.2GW Hinkley Point C in Somerset. The government said it was “committed to the future of nuclear energy”.

Have politicians made a fundamental miscalculation when it comes to the contribution of electric cars? In 6,000 of the 8,760 hours a year, more electricity from fossil-fuel power plants will be needed in addition to green electricity. Then the real CO2 emissions could be much higher than the politicians estimate, in total even twice as high.

The 11 largest banks in the EU have €532 billion of investments and loans financing everything from extraction to transportation of fossil fuels, equivalent to 95% of their total common equity tier 1 capital. A sudden drop in value of these “fossil-fuel assets” would deplete the banks’ capacity to absorb losses and might even leave them vulnerable to bankruptcy.

The rich across the globe have big ambitions for sustainable investing. More than half still believe they have to sacrifice returns to invest in a sustainable way. The results from the study come after a survey last year showed the new generation of wealthy people prioritizes financial returns over do-good strategies just as much as their parents did.

Brussels is considering classifying gas as a partially sustainable technology under its landmark green labelling system for investors who want to plough their money into sustainable finance. Many of its 27 member states are fiercely protective over their right to use sources such as gas and nuclear power as part of the transition to net zero emissions.

Gas power stations used to determine the high peak prices for electricity during midday hours. The first solar power stations benefited from these high prices. But now that solar produces enough electricity around midday, prices have dropped. Moreover, peak is now in the evening and solar faces a noticeable discount to the around-the-clock price.

The German government has agreed to pay nuclear operators 2.4 billion euros in compensation for an early nuclear shutdown. Germany had decided to decommission nuclear power plants by 2022. It is still unclear, how the taxpayers’ money will be divided between the electricity producers, such as RWE, EnBW, E.ON and Vattenfall.

A deregulated market that rewards power generation without requiring reliable capacity ready to supply power as needed naturally tilted the field in favour of intermittent solar and wind power. The knife-edge fragility of power grids in Western Europe and the UK which have imposed policies that forced rapid growth in renewable energy capacity is no surprise.

Sweden is in the green elite. Yet a cold snap provoked a political storm this winter when, in order to keep the lights on, the authorities started up a 52-year-old oil-fired power plant. A furious debate centered on the wisdom of decommissioning nuclear plants, exposing a divide over plans to rely more on wind power for everything from transport to factories.