LONDON (Financial Times) - Solar power has been accounted for almost a quarter of electricity generated in the UK at lunchtime — a record that exceeded the combined output of the country’s eight nuclear power stations.
 An almost cloudless late spring day across Britain sent solar output soaring to 8.7 gigawatts, or 24.3 per cent of overall electricity generation, compared with about 23 per cent from nuclear power.
The new peak highlighted the surge in solar installations in the UK — especially sunnier southern regions — aided by government subsidies and an 80 per cent fall in the price of solar panels since 2009.
When wind, biomass and hydro were added, almost 40 per cent of UK electricity came from renewables at Friday’s peak, exceeding the 30 per cent from gas and just 1.4 per cent from coal.
 Soaring amounts of renewable energy are advancing UK efforts to tackle climate change — carbon dioxide emissions fell by almost 6 per cent last year — and increasing competition for conventional power generators.
 As solar power flooded the system on Friday, wholesale electricity prices for the day ahead traded at about £38 per megawatt hour, compared with about £50 p/mwh in spring 2013 before fossil fuel prices went into sharp decline.
 Increasing supplies of cheap solar power are intensifying debate over the future of UK energy policy as work proceeds on the Hinkley Point C nuclear power station in Somerset — Britain’s first new nuclear plant since the 1990s — which has been promised a guaranteed price of £92.50 p/mwh, rising with inflation for 35 years. Friday’s peak solar output was almost three times greater than the planned 3.2GW generating capacity of Hinkley.
 Duncan Hawthorne, chief executive of Horizon, a Japanese-owned company planning to build another new nuclear plant in Wales, told a Financial Times energy conference this week that the UK would still need nuclear power to provide reliable base load electricity when wind and solar is unavailable.
"If you do not want to replace existing nuclear, then you will have to fill in the gap and I guarantee it will not be solar and it will not be wind,” he said. "They can do part of it but not all of it.”
Critics of nuclear power claim that increasing renewable output coupled with advances in battery storage can account for much of the coal and old nuclear generating capacity due to be decommissioned in coming years.