Nuclear - future for Ireland?

charlie14

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/122173340#Comment_122173340

Where are you getting 38c for Ireland from that Eurostat data ? It clearly shows Irish electricity prices double that of Finland.

Some here are running around attempting to ignore the several very large elephants in the room. On price that particular elephant is the marginal pricing policy where regardless of how low the gas precentage in the energy mix is we pay for 100% of that energy at the gas price.The only financial benefit in that is to the renewable energy companies. Nada for the consummer.

We currently have a 2050 37GW offshore wind/hydrogen plan favored by these posters where they have no clue how much it will cost, where 25% of the proposed wind turbines are not even technically possible to construct within the next 20 years or more and where nobody has a clue if the hydrogen proposal will work to scale. THe complete insanity of this so called plan is even if it was financially viable and hydrogen worked to scale, it still would not be close to fulfilling our 2050 requirements. And that is before Eamon Ryan`s admission that 25% of that offshore plan is not even possible within the next 20 years or more.

If you really are concerned about electricity prices, then would you not be better campaigning at the very least for the marginal pricing policy that benefits nobody other than the renewable companies to be scrapped because under this plan it will dictate our electricity price well beyond even 2050 ?

Busman Paddy Lasty

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/122173571#Comment_122173571

The graph has Ireland price up near 50c. I zoomed in, only use phone, and read it as 49c. The blue bar at bottom has minus 11c. Probably factoring in the rebates.

charlie14

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/122173601#Comment_122173601

So we were twice the price of Finland for electricity and over 60% higher than the E.U. average.

The IDA said last early year they were having problems interesting foreign companies to invest here due to energy costs. I cannot see where that Eurostat data or this current plan will make life any easier for them.

bk

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/122173571#Comment_122173571

Errr.. Marginal pricing doesn't have anything to do with renewables! Electricity generation has always been driven by marginal pricing, even for decades before renewables became a thing.

The reason being, all commodity markets are priced based on marginal pricing and of course oil, gas and coal are by far the biggest commodity markets and as a result of their traditional domination of electricity generation it feed into how the electricity market worked.

Even if you tried taking marginal pricing out of the electricity generation market, the gas you used would still be priced marginally.

It is funny that people think renewables are the reason for marginal pricing, when it is in fact fossil fuels that drive it.

Busman Paddy Lasty

10c or 35% higher than the EU figure.

14c or 60% higher than Finland.

charlie14

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/122173767#Comment_122173767

Other than you perhaps being colour blind there is no or.

Without VAT and other taxes the price of electricity for Ireland last 6 months of last year was double that of Finland and over 60% higher than the E.U. average.

charlie14

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/122173758#Comment_122173758

Absolute nonsense. The marginal pricing policy has everything to do with renewables and the price we are paying for electricity.

It gives renewable companies the first shot at filling the demand with as much as they can provide where they will be paid the price of the most expensive source in the mix, regardless of how low the percentage of that source is.

It`s the reason why, if there is any truth in renewables being cheaper to generate electricity, the consummer has not seen the benefits financially and under the current 37GW plan will not for long after 2050, if ever, while it remains in place.

Nobody other than renewable companies are benefiting financially from the marginal pricing policy.

Busman Paddy Lasty

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/122173837#Comment_122173837

Resorting to personal insult I see.

The consumer pays the price including taxation. In Ireland's case there is negative taxation on the graph, reducing the price to 38c.

38c Ireland

28c EU

24c Finland

bk

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/122173949#Comment_122173949

Ah, I see, so you haven't a clue what you are talking about and are instead deep into conspiracy!

cnocbui

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/122171584#Comment_122171584

So why repeat it?

Only someone completely out of arguments tries to drag up a 12 year old scandal which was thoroughly addressed and ceased to be an issue over a decade ago.

charlie14

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/122174014#Comment_122174014

Nothing personal in my post. I just fail to see how otherwise anyone cannot see that excluding VAT, other taxes or rebates that the actual cost of our electricity to generate is twice that of Finland and over 60% more expensive than the E.U. average.

charlie14

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/122174034#Comment_122174034

LOL. No conspiracy as to the marginal pricing policy. Just the simple facts of how it operates and why if it remains in place we would be paying for 100% our electricity at the price of gas with this current offshore plan long after 2050 with no financial benefit to anyone other than the renewable companies.

Busman Paddy Lasty

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/122174115#Comment_122174115

You are saying generation costs now but we were discussing consumer prices back and forth.

Busman Paddy Lasty

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/122174112#Comment_122174112

The quote from the Korean expert states KHNP removed several safety features, up to 80% of newer design safety features. This cost saving enable KHNP build many plants quickly at a low cost. That is relevant as these plants are now in service with less safety infrastructure than the competition, potentially for another 40 years.

I am not out of arguments. I posted a bullet point list a year ago with constraints Ireland has regarding building nuclear plants. They are still relevant and most were just ignored anyway.

I've said before a nuclear plant up at Greenore would do nicely but we have constraints that France and Finland don't. This thread is full of the same renewables vs French/Finnish nuclear instead of actually staying close to the thread title.

josip

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/122174426#Comment_122174426

I'm glad to hear someone finally talking in practical rather than theoretical terms.

Do you think the people of Carlingford and elsewhere on the Cooley peninsula could be convinced to have a NPP located a couple of kms down the road?

Would all the land necessary have to be CPO-ed from the local farmers? How long would that take and what level of opposition on the ground?

How much land do you even need for a NPP anyway? (Either hectare or acre units will be ok)

Do you think the voting public of Louth might be more or less averse to an NPP given they were the ones on the 'front line' wrt Sellafield back in the 70s and 80s?

I'd be interested if any of the other pro-NPP people can answer the above. The NPP opportunity for Ireland is gone. There might have been one there in the 70s/80s when we could have done with the jobs. But there's still a whole generation left who grew up living with Sellafield on the other side of the Irish sea. And as long as we're around to vote, it's not going to happen. The new generation can present all the business cases they can create for NPP. Not going to happen. Ye can cry into your cornflakes. By the time we're gone, any possible business case for nuclear will have been wiped out by renewables and storage.

Busman Paddy Lasty

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/122174700#Comment_122174700

Good point re Louth folk. I first mentioned Greenore as a site because of our prevailing SW wind. Get it close to UK to see how they like a taste of their own medicine. It would likely be protested but you never know until a specimen plan is put forward. I work with people who live over the border and work in Eire, there could be appetite for it based on jobs for the border region.

It could be a joint venture between Eire, NI and rest of UK too as a way to involve the UK instead of getting pressure from them to scrap it. Whereas if Carnsore in Wexford was listed a preferred site, with no British expertise involved, the Brits could be dead against it.

cnocbui

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/122174700#Comment_122174700

You don't need much land for a NPP. Sizewll A is on a 245 acre site. Nuclear needs 1/10,000th the land area that wind does, according to Rolls Royce.

A US study of energy sources and land use, estimates for the US to be powered solely by nuclear would require 440 sq Km of land, while to do the same with wind would require 66,000.

In terms of siting NPP's, I believe you would have no problem finding communities happy to have them located nearby, if you simply offer the locals free electricity for the life of the plant. I believe they do this in France.

This supposed siting problem is another manufactured argument. Every country that has NPPs has solved this problem.

One of the problems with this country is it hasn't enough forests. I'd CPP any objectors properties and plant native species woodlands with no eye to commercial utility, the rest get free power for life. I'm pretty sure a lot of prospective NIMBY objectors would shut up and take the money.

An NPP is a minuscule imposition on the landscape, compared to wretched wind farms.

https://www.bisconti.com/blog/9th-national-survey-of-nuclear-power-plant-neighbors

charlie14

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/122174283#Comment_122174283

How can you discuss consummer prices for electricity while ignoring the cost of generation ?

Busman Paddy Lasty

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/122175475#Comment_122175475

To the best of my knowledge neither of us posted a chart with generation costs. So we were discussing a chart that ignores generation costs. Blame the stupid chart, not me!

charlie14

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/122175512#Comment_122175512

Nothing stupid about the data from Eurostat. It shows that we have the most expensive electricity in Europe and most likely worldwide.

Not only will the current 37GW plan, so financially unviable that those supporting it run a mile when asked for a cost, not come even close to achieving carbon neutral generation by 2050, under the marginal pricing policy we will be paying for all generation at the price of gas until at least then as well.

KrisW1001

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/122175956#Comment_122175956

Jesus Christ. Stop it.

We do not have the most expensive electricity in Europe, and that chart you love so much even says this.

If you can't understand what a graph in a report is saying, for the love of whatever deity you observe, please read the accompanying text. The text helps a lot. Reading and understanding it especially helps you to not make a fool of yourself.

I also suggest you look at the data for industrial electricity prices across Europe. It will show you the extent to which government policy drives pricing, and it's as big a factor as generation costs.

charlie14

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/122176226#Comment_122176226

Rant away to your hearts content. It will not change that the graph is for household electricity, not industial electricity, and it clearly shows our generation costs for electricity as the highest in Europe. But then perhaps you believe the generation cost has no bearing on the cost to households as well.

When it comes to policy, I have no problem understanding how the marginal pricing policy is driving the price. No problem either seeing that this 37GW 2050 plan will not only be not within a mile of of our 2050 requirements, it also means that 2050 carbon neutral generation is not a remote possibility and we will be generating electricity using gas well after that date.

Good for the renewable companies though soas they will be getting the gas price due to the marginal pricing policy. Not great for household who will be getting ripped off paying.

cnocbui

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/122176226#Comment_122176226

We had the fourth highest electricity prices in the EU in 2021:

https://www.rte.ie/news/business/2021/0427/1212373-electricity-prices-23-above-eu-average/

Then in 2023 we had the third highest prices:

https://www.irishmirror.ie/news/irish-news/ireland-now-3rd-highest-electricity-29818006

And then in 2024 we had the highest:

Electricity Prices in Ireland: Are They Finally Going Down?

By David Tait

Editorial Manager
Updated on
30/04/2024

Ireland has the most expensive electricity prices in Europe! In our electricity prices guide, we’ll walk you through the reasons for the high prices and why Ireland’s are the most expensive in Europe!

Nice little mathmatical progression there, 4..3..1, do I need to draw a graph?

And if you are Donald Trump and think it's all a media conspiracy, we have the International Energy Ageny and their interactive map of energy prices around the world:

https://www.iea.org/data-and-statistics/data-tools/real-time-electricity-tracker?from=2024-4-24&to=2024-5-24&category=price

Wherein you can see that Ireland easily has the most expensive electricity in all of Europe, at €107.8 per MWh.

Good news though, ours is not the most expensive in the world, just fourth; We have been kept off the podium by our fellow third world countries, Nicaragua, Mexico and the Phillipines.

By all means appeal to Jesus Christ, I'll even join in:

Dear lord Jesus Christ, what have we done to deserve such prices? Deliver us from Eamon Ryan and his gutless power at any cost coalition enablers and his mindlessly stupid renewables policy that makes us eternally reliant on gas, because the capacity factor realities of renewables are just sh​it.

Now please, can we have more incredibly convincing, IEA trumping, personal anecdotal energy prices to make our energy costs go down.

I am with the ESB and they just charged me 0.3287 per unit.

€107.8 per MWh, thank goodness we have cheap renewables and gas and not expensive nuclear, just imagine how bad it might be then:

The French energy regulator, Commission de Régulation de l’Energie
(CRE), has calculated the complete production cost of France’s existing
nuclear fleet, taking into account several cost components, over the
period 2026-2040. The full cost of existing nuclear power calculated by
the CRE amounts to respectively €60.7/MWh over the period
2026-2030, €59.1/MWh over 2031-2035, and €57.3/MWh over 2036-2040 (in
2022 euros).

KrisW1001

@cnocbui Yes, we have a shortage of generation. I thought that this was the only thing that people agreed with on this bloody thread.

Ireland is almost unique in Europe in that we don't export electricity very often. Low average prices elsewhere are due to negative pricing when that country is exporting large amounts of its electricity, and we do not export, because we don't have that spare capacity.

This is the whole point of building out renewables: we will export the surplus in order to reduce our net generation cost.

You could achieve the same results by building a nuclear plant, and while I am not against nuclear power, I still do not believe that the cost/benefit makes sense in our grid. It works for Finland (which is now planning to mine its own uranium... what are our uranium deposits? zero), a country that has a long-established nuclear industry in place already and the ability to cheaply send surplus into the European grid, but it won't work for us, starting from scratch, with export possible only through expensive undersea interconnectors. Nuclear has an enormous baseline cost compared to any other generation type, but much of that can be shared when you add more reactors. Our problem is that we cannot scale up to a cost-effective nuclear fleet size without incurring more costs in interconnectors.. we live on an island, and this is one of those times where that becomes very important.

The cost to install renewables is lower than nuclear, and unlike nuclear it is incremental and fine-grained: hundreds of generators, not one or two. This matters for network resilience. If we had three reactors providing 75% of our generation (that's where I see the break-even on cost), how can we keep the grid stable if one goes offline? A single point of failure that drops 25% is a nightmare, because as an isolated grid, we can't instantly draw on our neighbours. The only option is hugely overprovisioned DC interconnectors and those are really expensive. Compare again with Finland.. if it loses a reactor to maintenance, that's no problem, as it has multiple AC connections with its neighbouring counties and so it won't need to make up the loss itself.

But let me explain why that post pisses me off every time he posts it :

IEA has a figure of €108/MWh for Ireland. I don't dispute it at all, but that's megawatt hours, while we general public think in kilowatt hours. So, let's divide that number by a thousand.

We get €0.108, The cost to put one unit of electricity into the Irish grid, including the generator's profits.

How does that figure relate to €0.37, your own average unit price? (Notably not as high as on that graph, but retail electricity prices have fallen sharply since 2023).

Now compare other countries differences between generation and domestic costs. Something else, something that isn't generation, seems to be responsible for most of the price paid, and it's not a constant between countries.

So... why is someone harping on about residential pricing while trying to argue about generation costs?

If you look at industrial pricing, you'll discover that a lot of our high residential cost is in distribrution (connecting premises to the grid) rather than transmission (getting electricity through the grid itself): Industrial customers are never miles from the grid, but houses here often are, and you see this in much lower industrial prices.

charlie14

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/122177134#Comment_122177134

If you take those IEA figures and convert every country in Europe`s megawatt hours figure to kilowatt hours you are still going to be pissed off as other than moving the decimal point it will change nothing and still show that the cost to put one unit of electricity, plus the generators profit, onto the Irish grid is still by far the most expensive in Europe.

Again with "The cost to install renewables is lower than nuclear" without as much as a single figure to back up that claim.And where are you getting this that building out renewables will have us exporting electricity when the current 37GW 2050 plan was not going to even provide our own requirements before Eamon Ryan admitted that 25% of the turbines required for that 37GW could not be constructed within the next 20 years or more.

If you are interested in exporting electricity truly concerned over costs, and a sudden drop off from nuclear, then for the price of a much delayed and over budget Finnish nuclear plant for €44 billion you could build four. Three of which would cover our projected needs for 2050 where the 4th. could be used as a spare while providing all this hydrogen greens are so enamoured with much more efficiently than renewables could. You could gold plate all four and still be quids in compared to renewables.

As to do we have uranium deposits in Ireland. The greens, and especially Eamon Ryan, are very determined to ensure we never know. As far back as 2007 as Minister for Natural Resources he refused exploration permits to two companies in regards to Donegal, where as far as I recall, along with Wicklow there were strong indications we did.

gjim

when the current 37GW 2050 plan was not going to even provide our own requirements

Go on then - show us how you arrived at this conclusion?

We currently have a 2050 37GW offshore wind/hydrogen plan favored by these posters where they have no clue how much it will cost

Hilarious - you're so concerned about not being able to predict the cost, that you reckon Ireland should embark on building nuclear reactors. You're beyond parody.

I will predict one thing with absolute confidence - these future offshore wind turbines you seem so indignant about will cost less than they do today, which is less than what they cost last year, which in turn is less than two years ago, and every year before that going on 20 years.

Capt'n Midnight

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/122177662#Comment_122177662

Back in 1949 they were able to detect uranium while travelling at 150mph at an altitude of 500ft. That was 75 years ago.

Citation : Frank W. Stead (1956) Airborne Radioactivity Surveying: USA, Journal of the
Air Pollution Control Association, 6:3, 147-150, DOI: 10.1080/00966665.1956.10467745

Alternatively guess where radon comes from ?

Or you could look for granite.

Here's a more recent survey.

https://secure.dccae.gov.ie/GSI_DOWNLOAD/Tellus/PDFs/Tellus_A1_TNM_Geophysical_Interpretation_Report.pdf

As for gold plating , to be fair gold is the most malleable metal so gold plate can be incredible thin. The sun visors used on the moonwalk space suits were so thin that they were transparent.

charlie14

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/122179986#Comment_122179986

I can only assume for whatever reason you are just acting the eejit.

You have been on this thread for some time so I cannot see how you could have missed that Sept 2023 5GW of U.K. offshore did not recieve a single bid.

It wasn`t just confined to this thread. It was all over mainstream media as well.

Capt'n Midnight

PV in Portugal is now down to €14.76/MWh that's less than a tenth of the cost of Hinkley C.

€155.33/MWh=£92.50/MWh(2012)=£132.28 (2024)

That sort of price differential means it's worth researching storage.

https://techxplore.com/news/2024-05-renewable-grid-recovering-electricity-storage.html and 50% looks doable in the future.

Heat up some rocks and you've potentially got grid scale storage that's more efficient than hydrogen storage.

Nuclear is being proposed as a power source, whose "advantage" is that it can work during dark calm weather. The fact that it can't ramp up output during those time is glossed over as are the outages. Once the cost of storage drops there is no reason to consider waiting for nuclear when renewables can be rolled out way faster.

charlie14

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/122180103#Comment_122180103

There appear to be some high concentrations for that area of the country and if there were two companies looking for licences in 2007 to explore in Donegal, where there is a lot of granite it would suggest that indications were that it was even higher there. With Eamon Ryan refusing to grant those licences as far back as 2007 when he was Minister for Natural Resources, would that qualify him as an oxymoron or just his ministry ?

Nowadays with him only granting licences for gold and silver exploration, who knows what goes through his head at times. He may even have a plan to send an electric powered rocket to the moon where he needs gold for the sun visors.