Nuclear - future for Ireland?

Leaving aside that petrol-powered passenger cars have nothing to do with wind energy for a moment…

More fool you for believing anything Donald Trump says - his record on follow-through is abysmal, even for an American Presidential candidate. This was a throwaway comment to placate people who believe environmental measures make cars more expensive to run (it’s not true: ever-rising customer expectations around comfort, cabin equipment and performance have made cars more expensive to buy and to run). What it would do for the car-makers is… nothing.

Our friend has stopped reading by now, and is already crafting a rebuttal based on two or three words of what I wrote, taken out of context, but if anyone’s interested in why this is a hollow promise, it has to do with how cars are built.

Car-makers run on extremely short inventories, and are reliant on external suppliers for most of their technology - stampings and engine blocks are usually the only thing you can be sure a car-maker actually produces on one of their own sites. An engine includes multiple systems to control airflow and reduce emissions - these are designed by the car maker, but made by external suppliers. Reducing emissions standards to 2019 levels won’t help carmakers at all because they’re already building with designs and components to meet the current and future levels, they’ve already spent that R&D cost, and their suppliers are already manufacturing the components. There’s no stack of “old engines” they can dust off and use for free. They would need to stop making the new product and instead re-start the old one, or (more likely) redesign the new one to work to looser emissions limits.

The problem with changing things once you’re already making them is that car makers mainly drive down costs by offering their component suppliers huge-volume contracts (this is the rationale behind Volkswagen’s MQB platform family - every front-wheel drive car they made used the same small selection of components; if you go to a supplier like Hella with an order for three million alternators you’ll get a better price than asking for half a million units each of six different specifications). If you’re locked into a two-million unit contract for EGR systems, for instance, taking advantage of Trump’s “generosity” means that you will incur a litany of costs: a break fee, a redesign cost (the new product usually can’t use the old, non-compliant components), a requalification process (you change the emissions profile, you need to re-certify), then a new supplier contract (at worse rates, as you’ve just screwed them over on the previous one). The costs won’t pay off from some notional saving that you hope will swing customers toward your cars, especially when there’s a 50% chance that the generous gesture will be reversed by the next administration - four years is nothing in the US car market, where models frequently stay on the market for up to 12 years.

(Oh, and in the USA, emissions are a state competency, so California will still impose the new limits).

Apologies for the off-topic, but it’s an example of how little thought is behind the policies of populists like Trump.

Sorry , at current prices under ress 3, wind energy costs €100.47 per megawatt hour .. which I assume is down to high costs of commodities and concrete, high cost of building anything in Ireland, higher interest rates , and high planning and development costs ..

https://cms.eirgrid.ie/sites/default/files/publications/RESS-3-Final-Auction-Results-%28R3FAR%29.pdf

After this latest spell of Dunkelflaute those countries that were supplying green energy via interconnectors are seriously ticked off being used as back up batteries and are far from happy with interconnectors.

Who is ticked off, exactly? Where have the expressed it? You just made this up, right?

Predicting that wind is going to drop off the scale for an extended period is going to gain you nothing. There is nothing you can do to change that

Knowing that extra demand is going to exist a week or so in advance is very helpful in managing a grid.

We do not have any reserves worth mentioning,

Yet we've never experienced a blackout due to a lack of wind? Where do you think the extra electricity comes from when there's no wind? It's called a "reserve".

We have burned more fossil fuels to make up the difference or we have imported nuclear generated energy from the U.K.

We avoided burning 13GWh worth of fossil fuels last year because our wind infrastructure produced exactly that amount of electricity. This is basic arithmetic charlie - we've burned LESS fossil fuels because of wind - not more - SIGNIFICANTLY less.

how do we get to zero generation emissions by 2050 when as you say wind VERY FREQUENTLY drops to 6% or less without burning fossil fuels

So? I don't think fossil fuels are evil, do you? Just that we need to reduce our reliance on them.

For now, natural gas is a great compliment for wind - although batteries are clearly better for solar. NG plants are low risk, quick to deploy, can respond in minutes to match demand, are cheap to operate and are economic even when only turned on occasionally - typically 10% of the time for a gas peaker plant. Nuclear has NONE of these attributes.

How to get to ZERO? I dunno to be honest, I'm not inclined to make predictions about future technology.

But I do know, to get to ZERO we have to first get to 20% (having started at 90%). Do you agree?

We can get to 20% cheaply and easily with our current set of technologies - which is wind, solar, batteries, interconnectors and natural gas.

Paraphrasing, the Labour government party wants to think about campaigning in April on the topic of renegotiating the electricity interconnector deal in the run up to a September election!

FYI Sweden and Germany have, in the past, decided to turn off nuclear plants. These were bad human decisions that have nothing to do with renewables.

Considering they have happened in 1. Not Ireland. 2. Not in the future. They have absolutely no business in this thread.

€157.55 per MWh today if I am correct.

Even if we got the same strike price today as the U.K. per MWh latest rate, with our proposed wind/hydrogen plan the strike price here to the consumer would be one third higher. And that is without the hydrogen add-ons. With them I cannot see it being better than 50% higher.

I'm a bit sketchy on the the RAB funding model ,

There isn't a strike price , because it's not a CFD , and I get that the investors start getting a return on investment made almost immediately, well definitely year by year - it's a fee added to power bills, like our PSO , but I'm not sure what happens when the plant is in production,does the Rab just stop then ?

is the electricity sold at market rate?

Do nuclear generators get preferred access to the grid , ?

If investors are getting a 5% return on investment under the Rab, is it on the value of investment made , or potential value of the asset at that time , ?

No idea on the RAB tbh as I have never spent any time looking into it.

In 2022 the EU Commission tabled a Complementary Delegated Act of the E.U. Taxonomy Regulation which gave nuclear the same status as gas in being a transitional energy source. So I imagine similar to gas, renewables still get first shot at filling the demand

Nuclear, like gas is only recognised by the EU as a transitional energy source. That ensures that only those energy sources recognised as renewable get preferential access to attempt to fill demand. They do not need to quote a price, and even if they supply 95% of the demand they will be paid the same price per unit as the price of the non recognised renewable highest priced source in the other 5% under the marginal pricing policy.

It is money for old rope for renewables and will never reduce the cost of electricity while it remains. It is such a crazy policy that if we were using coal rather than gas our electricity would be cheaper. Not that I am advocating that, but when you see that wood burning for generation is classified as carbon neutral when even green advocacy groups say it is more carbon emissions intense than coal, (even An Taisce are not buying the carbon neutral claim), it just further shows how the whole shambles vested interests have turned electricity generation into where 60% of E.U. energy is from biomass.

Entirely correct. Not just today but ever since the mid-20th century we've been sold a lot of fluff and nonsense about renewables. It was BS then and it's BS now.

It is fortunate for Germany than when the wind drops off, they can simply dump so much of their instability on their neighbours.

But as you point out, their neighbours are noticing:

"Dark Doldrums" strike – electricity price record in Germany | Sweden Herald

The electricity prices in Germany peaked at 1,013.2 euros per megawatt-hour (approximately 12 kronor per kWh) during the afternoon – significantly higher than the peaks during the crisis in 2022.

Who could possibly have foreseen that trying to power a civilisation with an electricity supply that is - quite literally - at the mercy of the weather would cause problems? 😯

Or we could do like France did and go nuclear - they burn very little gas in France. BTW part of the response to unstable renewables is to have power plant types that can respond quickly to extreme changes in supply or demand. That usually comes in the form of gas or oil fired peaker plants.

You only have to worry about dunkelflatue if your country was dumb enough to go all-in on renewables leaving you at the mercy of the weather. Or in the case of Southern Sweden, if your neighbour did so and is dumping their instability onto your grid.

When you see, given Germant`s past history, one group of politicians accusing another group of "an ideologically motivated wrong decision" it tends to say a lot about the insanity of an ideology that shuts down a zero carbon energy source during an energy crisis that they played a major part in creating.

To then drain electricity from their neighbours due to that "ideologically motivated and wrong decision" doen`t say much for their integrity, or their ideology having much to do with their supposed concerns on climate change.

Germany is a fly in the ointment,and a very large one , it's a huge electricity user ,both because of its huge population and industry , but their energy policies , have been .. interesting, - buy more Russian gas .. it's cleaner than coal ,

Allow Russia to build undersea pipelines so it could bypass it's neighbours-and allowing Germany to buy more Russian gas

Start turning off existing nuclear power plants - and buy more Russian gas ..

Go renewable, even though Germany isn't particularly sunny or windy and they don't have vast hydro resources ,- but it's ok because you can buy more Russian gas ..

Encourage your population to install renewables,on their homes - and pay them way over the odds to export onto the grid .. but it's ok cause we'll buy more Russian gas

Realise you've been taken for a ride and your best mate in the east has been taking the piss - bang and the gas is gone ...

https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/france-adds-first-nuclear-reactor-25-years-grid-2024-12-21/

I think there was a lot of technological optimism from EDF that they'd get this design right straight away , but it is running ,

The really interesting plant will be Sizewell C , ( if they build it ) , it's pretty much the same design as hinkly C, and supposed to be all the bugs and glitches worked out

So if sizewell C comes in pretty much on time and on budget , and the other plants run reliably - then french nuclear design and build is back in the game ..

but it'll be 15 years min before we know for sure