On Thursday, the government announced that it will be going ahead with plans for the Hinkley Point C project, the first new nuclear power station to be built in Britain in a generation. The announcement comes after two months of doubt over the project’s future after the government delayed approval in July.

The approval comes with some legal provisos; the government will have a say in who runs the plant and will make the project and all future critical infrastructure plans like it subject to a national security test. On thursday, business and energy secretary Greg Clarke said ministers are coming up with a new legal framework which means that, after Hinkley, the government will take a special share in all future nuclear new build projects to ensure that significant stakes cannot be sold without ministers’ knowledge or consent.

Giving the go-ahead for the controversial project in Somerset, which the government claims will deliver 7% of England’s electricity needs when operational, Greg Clarke said, “Britain needs to upgrade its supplies of energy, and we have always been clear that nuclear is an important part of ensuring our future low-carbon energy security.”

Reacting to the announcement, the Renewable Energy Agency (REA) said that, for the anticipated output of the project, 23 GW of solar installations could be installed in the UK for half the price of the National Audit Office (NAO)’s projected cost to the public (lifetime costs for the Hinkley Point C project are anticipated to reach £29.7bn). REA said that in the first quarter of 2016, renewables generated a record of 25.1% of the UK’s electricity, that renewables are cheaper and quicker to deploy than nuclear and that renewable energies are the only power technologies to have been consistently delivering new capacity in the past decade.

Energy experts at the University of Sussex were openly critical of the government’s decision. Professor Benjamin Sovacool, Director of the Sussex Energy Group, echoed REA when he said, “This is a bad deal for the UK and we’re going to be counting the costs for decades. Hinkley C may make sense from an investment or trade standpoint, helping bring in new experience and contractors into the UK energy scene, but it is a step backwards in terms of cost efficacy.

“Energy efficiency practices and reductions in demand could have saved an even larger amount of energy at a fraction of a cost, as well as cost-effective renewables such as wind and solar.”

Dr Philip Johnstone, Research Fellow in the Sussex Energy Group, added, “No amount of evidence regarding the immense costs and technical challenges experienced with the EPR reactor destined for Hinkley has changed the minds of British politicians. This decision defies logic in terms of economics or efficacy with the government’s own figures showing more practical and cheaper low-carbon alternatives.

“Britain is the only country in Europe so wedded to nuclear when others are turning away. We must now seriously question why the UK remains so uniquely attached to nuclear energy because on the grounds of costs, technical performance, and security this deal makes little sense.”

Just days before the announcement the government’s Energy and Climate Change Select Committee (ECCC) released its 2020 renewable heat and transport targets report. The report warns the government is not on track to reach its 2020 targets and calls for renewables and decarbonisation to be at heart of industrial strategy. The Committee also wants to see a cap on crops used for renewable transport fuels, which it said should be set at a level that would enable targets to be met.