Nuclear - future for Ireland?

The UK is less dependent on gas for electricity than we are, and that's why the price rise affected us more, pushing our prices above theirs. The early 2000s were also the point where the Kinsale gas reserves started to run out, leaving us more dependent on more expensive imported gas. It’s also worth noting that the UK was already a deregulated energy market at this point. You can’t argue that deregulation simultaneously increases (here) and decreases (there) the price of electricty paid by consumers.

There really is no conspiracy here. The overriding factor in our rising electricity prices is the price of gas. Regardless of when the domestic electricity market was opened to competition, our prices would have increased dramatically from 2000 to 2007.

What is true is that ESB, as the incumbent, were held back from discounting their retail prices for a couple of years in order to stop them using their market dominance to out-spend any competitor. But the logic behind the theory that competition forced ESB to raise its prices makes no commercial sense at all: if they were price-padding in the lead-up to deregulation, it would have hurt them badly the moment Bord Gáis and others entered the electricity market. You do not raise your prices just as new competitors are about to enter your market - especially when you’re going to be barred from discounting for two years to allow those new competitors to get a foothold in the market.

From the other side of the ESB, the part that inherited generation, you also don’t go and make your generation more expensive just at the point where you have to compete for buyers of it.

It was gas prices, nothing else.

Sorry but thats rubbish - the price of gas is currently way off any historical peaks. Blaming NG for an ever increasing rise in power prices here over the past 20 years on the back of shoe-horning every increasing wind capacity onto the grid exposes the utter nonsense of wind being a reliable or cheap option as a power source

Er, thanks for the irrelevant hot-take, I suppose, but we were discussing pricing in the period up to electricity deregulation in 2007.

I agree that the fictitious hydrogen economy is bonkers , with current tech , and I'm not sold on offshore wind either , there's a boom ongoing for it in the north sea and elsewhere since the Ukraine war , and the prices of the resources needed to build out the turbines and anchors and transmission system have gone through the roof ,. Like everything else , there's a cost/ benefit line in there somewhere

Also I think the maintenance costs for the turbines turned out to be much higher , than previously expected, so that had to be factored in also , either those prices will fall with supply, / demand and commodity prices or , we just won't / shouldn't install offshore wind ...

I'm not sure what all the hate on hinkly C is about , it's 35 billion in today's money for 3,6 gw

The strike price was agreed before the mad increases in commodity prices at a time of low inflation , it's currently delayed by a few years but considering nuclear power history - and the commotion in the world since COVID i'm not surprised, incidentally it's not the UK tax payer that's picking up the tab for delays and they are considerable - it's the french taxpayers , ( unless the UK gov took the place of the Chinese company that was being booted )

The interesting bit will be when they they or if they announce a projected cost and strike price for Sizewell , same design, but with current costs and hopefully any knowledge gleaned -

The polish project being talked about here was going to be between 37 and 40 billion for 3gw I think , not sure if that includes the cost of finance ..

Maybe ,

but all the costings I found online were for the first 3 reactors , and it was 15 billion of state money to get the project started , and the rest to come from international markets - to total somewhere between 37 and 40 billion euros ( I think ) , in today's money ..

And that's for the 3 Westinghouse 1gw reactors , maybe the projects are a bit muddled but they're not getting 5 reactors in 2 different designs ,and 2 different manufacturers, in 2 seperate projects ,for 30 odd billion..

That's not to say that 37 billion euro for 3 GWs of base load electricity is a bad price , a hell of a lot depends on what's included, and how long before the plant is in production ,

If 60 billion Zloty - €14 B - were just 30% of the total Westinghouse project cost, then the total would be €13.28 per GW.

This is utterly absurd, so I am doubling down on my previous assertion that the misreporting about this topic is dire.

The recently completed OL3 reactor in Finland was by any measure, a huge cost blowout and very expensive at €9 billion for 1.6 GW, so €5.62 B per GW

There is no way in hell Poland is paying Westinghouse nearly 3 times the EPR OL3 cost per GW for an established design with 12 units in operation.

The reporting doesn't pass the sniff test, it's just wrong, not only is it way out of whack compared to Ol3, it's way off compared with the UAE Barakah NPP costs and the reported costs of Korean APR-1400 built in Korea and the estimated cost for the two to be built in Poland.

That 60 billion Zloty would make perfect sense as 60% of the entire project cost, which then works out at €5.6 B per GW - roughly the same as OL3 and the €5.87 B per GW estimate for the two Korean APR-1400.

Alternatively, they might be referring to the long term 6 westinghouse reactors version of the project, not just the first 3.

An independent study of the benefit to the Polish economy of building Westinghouse AP1000 reactors was based on them building 6: https://www.world-nuclear-news.org/Articles/Economic-benefits-of-Polish-AP1000-deployment-high

Its not just offshore wind that's had a cost be blowout, all major construction has , the prices of staff ,concrete,steel ,copper have all gone through the roof .

If inflation for the decade pre COVID was in the region of 2 or 3 % per annum, ,(obviously it compounds) , since COVID it's anyone's guess, but 40 to 50% increase wouldn't be outlandish for construction inflation since COVID , in a booming economy like Polands ,

Yeah , it's expensive, when it's too expensive in an auction,don't build .. investigate why it's so expensive, and what can be reasonably changed to make it more affordable ,

Yup , I'd agree with you , at that pricing it's not worth building offshore -

Look , I'm not convinced about the full economics of nuclear , either way getting a nuclear power plant over the line planning wise in Ireland is likely impossible - unless things have gotten so bad that the whole economies has collapsed and in that case we won't have the money anyway ..

I do think wind and solar need to be cheap to make sense , way cheaper than now , because of the extra steps built in to the system. + our planning system seriously ups risks for developers, and hence costs ..

I have no idea what the cost for wind energy is in Texas - but it's likely to be pretty much as low as you go considering no state subsidies or state preferences,as well as cheap cheap natural gas availability, they do have an amazing wind resource though ..

Why do you think we've tapped out all our best wind resource sites ? There's a hell of a lot of high hills and coastal peaks that haven't even been considered ,

It's a 1000% hard no for me, we don't do big projects like this well by ourselves, so OK lets get an big foreign company to build it ⇒ OK see BAM and the children's hospital. One slip up with nuclear and it's good bye island of Ireland, even if you forced it through all planning and objections it wouldn't be built in time to mitigate or make any difference with climate change.

True , from a global warming point of view , although enational missions wise it looks like we're not even trying 😕,

But from a where's our energy coming from , it might as well be wind - I do think it a bit daft to not allow exploiting of known gas reserves - but I don't see why the state gets nothing in royalties and at the same time consumers pay top whack - if we're gonna pay world price and no state profit then leave the gas there ..

We're just not gonna build nuclear ,

Offshore wind is too expensive, and our solar resource is limited ,

And the juice has gotta come from somewhere

When prices go up they rarely come down. Especially when you see a sudden increase of 60%.

As insane as the present cost would be, it still would not make sense to go with this 37GW plan. It is supposed to have us at carbon zero generation by 2050. Problem is it would not. Our demand is projected to double by 2050. 37GW offshore would still leave us generating the same from fossil fuels then as we are now.

On shore wind generation has the same problem as offshore in that with it being intermittent you cannot ramp it up when required. We have seen long period when our demand was at it`s highest we were getting 6% and less of our requirements from onshore wind. This past week when we had our highest all time demand it was just 3%. When designing for an intermittent source, capacity factors which are the average of the installed capacity supplied measired over the period of a year are meaningless. If you want to get to zero emissions by 2050 from onshore wind, it is the 6% you have to use to design for. With projected demand to reach 14 GW by 2050 would require over 230 GW installed capacity (14/6 x100). Presently we have under 5 GW of installed onshore caoacity, so we would need at least 46 times more than we have now.

That would not come cheap never mind where all those turbines would be sited. On shore wind turbines have a 3-4 MW installed capacity. For 230 GW would require somewhere between 57,500 and 76,500 turbines.