The Chief Executive of the National Grid cleared up concerns we might encounter power outages because of power plant closures by announcing the nation would be “OK” during the winter season.
Steve Holliday National Grid CEO told BBC Radio 5live: “The plain truth is that we’ve closed a lot of generation down in England over the last few years.
“ Hence the margin we’ve got between the maximum quantity of supply that may be produced and the maximum demand that we may have in a very cold, dark, miserable winter’s night is less than it was a couple of years ago.”
The National Grid businessman included: “But we got through that last winter and we set some new measures in place with the help of Ofgem and government for the winter. Meaning that if things behave as you’d anticipate them to work, then we should be OK.”
Mr Holliday was marketing a scheme named Careers Lab to boost the amount of youngsters entering into STEM subjects of Science, Technology, Engineering and Maths.
Educational institutions battled to get space in their timetables for careers help and he said parliament needed to shift this emphasis.
Mr Holliday stated: “What’s being measured in schools of course is academic qualifications. Deservingly so, yet we’re calling that the attention we’ve got to increase the metrics on other destinations should be raised. So schools are assessed half on academic qualifications and another half on the destinations that children end up at.”
He said the young adults were making choices with “no information” available.
EDF Energy has more than doubled the female component of its fresh recruitment of newly qualified engineers to 32percent within a year, one of the company’s executives notified the first assembly of the recently founded UK chapter of Women in Nuclear (WiN).
The meeting occured in parliament on 23 June to coincide with the UK’s National Women in Engineering day.
Paul Spence, EDF’s Director of Strategy and Corporate Affairs, said females currently represent 20percent of the corporation’s apprentices, upward from 6%, due to a 190% improvement in the volume of women applicants.
Designing a career in nuclear energy attractive to more women “is possible with the right effort”, Spence said. “But if we are going to make science and engineering more accessible, we then need to start with girls – and boys – early in their school careers,” he stated.
Close to ten million school children have used EDF’s Pod application, that seeks to promote the STEM subjects, he stated.
As stated by the Nuclear Industry Association, women constitute 11-24percent of the UK nuclear sector, implying that it is outperforming different STEM fields.
