A clause in the subsidy deal gives ministers the right to cancel the contract if EDF, which has been plagued by delays building reactors elsewhere, has not hit a construction “milestone” within 33 months of taking its final investment decision.
The milestone requires the “commissioning of the main concrete batching plant” at the Somerset site.
But the Telegraph can disclose that EDF believes it has already “achieved that milestone”, after two concrete batching plants were commissioned earlier this year, months before the deal was inked in September.
While the meeting of the condition still has to be officially signed off by the Government agency handling the contract, EDF expects this to be “completed shortly”.
This renders the milestone clause largely pointless and leaves no other lever to ensure construction is proceeding as planned in coming years.
Ministers argue EDF has an incentive to build Hinkley by its 2025 target date because it will not receive any income until it starts generating.
However, the contract, which has been widely criticised as too generous, allows EDF to retain the same subsidy deal if Hinkley is up to four years late and only lets the Government cancel if it is still not running by 2033.
Alan Whitehead MP, Labour’s shadow energy minister, said ministers must confirm whether they knew the computerized concrete batching plant has already been built when the subsidy contract was signed.
If they did, it would be “a pretty alarming reflection on the way this particular contract may have been drawn up” and raised “serious questions”, he said.
Milestones were intended as a “protection of public money” to enable ministers to act “where funding is going into something which it is evident is not going to happen”, he said.
“You could be forgiven for the suspicion that this was a potentially deliberate clause which could have been designed to make it impossible for the milestone agreement to be breached,” he said.
Nigel Cann, EDF programme and construction delivery director, said one of the lessons it had learnt from its projects elsewhere had been “to have the concrete batching plant tested and operational on site at an early stage”.
“The condition was used in the contract as a mark for the start of significant construction on site. We intend to keep meeting such challenges with a similar commitment to safety, quality, and efficiency,” he said.
A spokesman for the Department of Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy, said: "The Government is committed to ensuring the country has a secure low carbon energy supply.
"We are confident that Hinkley Point C will be a critical part of that, and there are incentives in the contract for EDF to build the concrete batching plant features on time."
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