Nuclear - future for Ireland?

This might work well in warmer climates where winter is not a problem, but in this part of the world, peak energy requirements happen when there is the least amount of sunshine and solar radiation. That is, winter, during long nights. Those of us not living near the Equator need to have a plan to generate more electricity during winter, not less.

This will be doubly true if gas, oil and solid fuel heating starts to become less mainstream and there's electrification in building space heating.

Shouldn't discussion of solar and wind be on another thread? No point annoying people who want to talk about nuclear power...

it was a tongue-in-cheek comment based on what happened on the other thread, but that's a fair point...

October wasn't horrifying IIRC as regards temperatures. It would be interesting to see how your system performs during a January cold snap as opposed to, for example, August. At very least I would expect dramatically more energy production during the warmer months as opposed to the colder ones.

And while this setup might indeed make some sense at an individual level, it remains to be seen how this will help during a winter dunkelflaute. Germany has shown us that a country that has to contend with winter cannot rely solely on weather-dependent renewables. It may be a different matter in Iberia or Southern California, but we're in a different boat.

Hinkly C is at 2022 cost going to cost ,£ 127 per mwh produced , giving the UK 5% inflation for the last 3 years that's hitting about £148 per mwh , and keeps climbing with inflation, locked in for 35 years , peak ,off peak doesn't matter ,while it's capable of producing power ,.

https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/five-investors-uk-sizewell-c-nuclear-stake-bidding-process-developer-says-2024-12-05/

But the next nuclear power station after Hinckley , sizewell C ,is still very much in the running , and going forward , it'll be interesting to see what their strike price is agreed on , currently the estimated cost is likely 35 billion , sterling - in today's money , for 3.2 GW capacity ..

It may still be a good fit in the future ..

While Irish offshore (ORESS 1) is going to cost €86.05/MWh for 14.5 years and that was considered scandalously high by our nuclear-loving crew here.

Funny how no private investor in the electricity sector has EVER in history chosen to take on the risk to fully fund building a nuclear reactor. In contrast, private investors have funded generation from coal, gas, oil, solar, wind, batteries, hydro, absolutely anything in fact but never nuclear.

Two alternatives: either energy produced by nuclear is NOT actually cheap/competitive OR investors in the energy sector don't like making easy profits 🙄

There are no price supports for nuclear here unlike the lavish price guarantees given to wind developers

There are price supports for nuclear everywhere. Contracted sale price for nuclear electricity is based on the original projected build cost of the facility, not the outcone cost. Government usually ends up on the hook for construction overruns, so this is, in effect, a state subsidy. In Finland, the French government is subsidising the price of electricity from their latest nuclear plant (the Finns played hardball with the constructor, which sent them running to their own government for aid).

Also, the ORESS contracts are not pure subsidy. They include a clawback clause whereby the generator must pay the government all of the excess when market prices exceed the agreed piece.

This panels working better in cold weather thing is an egregiously misleading bit of techno fluff some clown dreamed up to try and make solar in Ireland not look like the sh​it it is. It's like something Elon Musk might come up with to fool the punters. This minor technical benefit is massively outweighed be the sheer dearth of actual direct sunlight, which is massively more important than the temperature of the panels. There is a PV farm in Western Australia which manages a capacity factor of 37.7%, yet for 4 months of the year you could near fry eggs on the panels they would be so hot. The degree to which the low temperatures would contribute to the Irish average capacity factor of 11%, would be very slight and of no actual benefit when a good part of the reason for the low temperatures is a lack of direct sunlight.

During the hours you are off grid, my total electricity usage would be 3 PC's, their monitors, two headless servers, two routers, a PON and 2 light bulbs. It wouldn't be hard for me to be off-grid too, if I had panels. Trying to big-up a technology that has an annual average capacity factor of 11% is silly.

It takes 11.4 KWh to heat 200l of water from 10°C to 60°, so panels generating 5 KWh on a rare sunny day in winter really don't have me rushing to a phone to get some.

Just read the whole paragraph ffs.

To sweeten the pot , the UK gov is planning to add a charge to electricity bills in the UK from the beginning of construction, so that investors start to get a return on investment earlier than if waiting for start of power production, or till covering operating costs ,

https://npowerbusinesssolutions.com/resources/new-charge-to-hit-electricity-invoices-to-fund-nuclear-construction

And this is a recent estimated price for hinkley C electricity , admittedly that £1.28 figure is sterling, and likely to be at least 5% higher today because of inflation .. so €1.62

"The latest data from the CFD register as of September 1, 2023 shows that the current minimum remuneration price (current strike price) has already risen to £128.09 /MWh (14.8 ct/kWh). This is a cost jump of over 43 percent, but there is currently no end in sight to the dynamic cost spiral for British nuclear power.

According to the CFD register, the first nuclear power plant unit (C 1) is scheduled to start up on June 1, 2027, followed by unit C2 on June 1, 2028. Assuming a British annual inflation rate of 3 percent and no further construction delays, the price of nuclear power generated from Hinkley Point C would already rise to 16.7 ct/kWh by the start date in 2027."

https://www.renewable-energy-industry.com/news/press-releases/pm-7986-hinkley-point-c-electricity-from-new-british-nuclear-power-plant-costs-over-15-cents-per-kilowatt-hour

This theory doesn’t stand up to any scrutiny. The rise in our electricity pricing is down to one thing only - the end of a historically low period for fossil fuel prices that ran from 1980 to 1999. Here's a composite chart of domestic electricity prices (Ireland is the dotted green line, UK is solid blue) versus natural gas prices (red) from 1990 to 2011. Market liberalisation started here in 2008, so anything after that I’ve coloured yellow.

(both graph scales are zero-based, but units are different. Prices are not inflation-adjusted)

Yes, there was an increase in electricity prices in the period leading up to liberalisation, but it’s fairly clear that this is due to a steady trend of increasing gas prices - gas was, and is, our primary energy source for electricity production at this time. Every instance of rising electricity prices in Ireland shadows a rise in gas pricing - delays and offsets are because energy utilities buy their gas on long-term future-price contracts, but the trend is obvious even still. There really was no price-fixing going on; we are just seeing how our dependence on imported gas leaves us with no control over our energy costs.

Sources: Electricity graph, ESRI, 2013: Irish and British Electricity prices and implications for the future
Gas graph, Global price of Natural gas, EU (PNGASEUUSDM) | FRED | St. Louis Fed