Nuclear - future for Ireland?

That’s fairly terrible for 8 to 9GW of installed wind and solar

There is approx 8GW of total renewables, but the real figure for Solar and Wind is more like 7GW

Your shitck is as follows

• Exagerate solar and wind capacity and cherry pick points of time to say they dont work
• Exagerate and underplay the cost of Nuclear
• Ignore calls for costings of Nuclear
• Put down arbiraty criteras for others to follow while not following any yourself

What is YOUR plan so?

"Your message is one of pure hope, completely devoid of the actual reality on the ground."

I have been following this thread for a couple of weeks now and don't really care what we do as long as its cheap and dependable. I've no interest in carbon economies or Internet point scoring and would happily restart our peat and coal plants if it meant cheaper and more dependable electricity. Equally, I have some domestic solar and storage and can see merit in their usefulness.

However, this thread has become more than a bit confusing. Mostly because I find myself agreeing with Pintsman Paddy Losty for the first time ever that there's a lot of off topic discussions.

On the pro-nuclear side, there's all sorts of costings done, some are based on grids or economies that aren't similar to Ireland and are immediately discarded by those who don't agree. Others talk about the cost of delays or decommissioning or life cycles. However there's a common trend of people trying to make a case for the technology.

Then on the pro-renewable side, there's lots of posts about wind and solar being complementary and batteries really stretching the technology. There's no real costs put forward and no real discussion about them because we are on a plan and we cannot change the plan so no point in providing any costs. That plan was made up on a whim by a Minister and then had the Dept scurry to make it seem credible.

I fail to see how this thread or real life politics goes anywhere if a proper cost benefit analysis can't be done. Even if it's a band of most optimistic to most pessimistic. Costs, planning, construction, lifetimes, decommissioning, risks, benefits, etc. We already have one of the highest prices for electricity in the world. Thankfully we've been rewarded with an up-to-now stable grid but there's only so much that we can pay for the future low carbon system. We need to properly compare, line by line, the strengths and weaknesses of nuclear vs the alternatives. Apples vs Crab apples.

My apologies. My mistake.

Also, thank christ I still don't have something in common with the other chap.

I think I have been quite clear about my plan and offered facts and figures to back them and various examples

Where are those figures for how much hydro or battery storage (and wind solar to fill em) we would need to replace the 18TWh of energy we generated in 2025 with gas? Don’t forget there’s a losses in pumping water up hill or charging batteries

Coincidentally this is the amount two AP1000 reactors output in a year at 92% capacity factor

The proponents in wind and solar continually downplay the massive capacity and variability problems and the massive cost of storage (not generation!) to replace gas as backup and hence become low carbon like European countries who already made the jump

Build 4-5 reactors with one kept on standby (like 1/3rd of moneypoint turbines was kept as backup) as backup in the rare case need maintenance

No need to spend hundreds of billions on gas, wind, and hydro/battery backup and more interconnector that are themselves expensive

Your storage cost alone is more than even the most expensive 4th gen nuclear

2GW of offshore wind in the Irish sea would generate about 7TWh - 8.8TWh of energy
3GW would generate 10.5TWh -13.1TWh

So we would really not be that far off.

Couple it with the expansion of Solar, we could easily get to case where the current Gas usage of about 50-55% per year would shrink to well less than 20% per year.

If my figures are wrong, show me where.

but it would be generating it mostly when onshore is generating, you will get nowhere near the 18TWh gap which is there precisely because wind and solar have such variability and low capacities and there’s no storage to store any surpluses and smooth out the peaks

Have you heard of batteries?
Have you heard of interconnectors?
Have you heard of the times if we have a gap, gas can fill the gap?

We are not looking at a perfect system where renewables can fill our needs 100% of the time, all the time.
We are looking first and foremost at getting Gas down to a small minority of usage, something we could quite well achieve within the next 5 years, given the scale of solar and wind installations.

In 5 years time, a nuclear power plant wouldn't even have reached the statutory planning stages..

Just on this, are there works in progress from EirGrid to fix this curtailment issue? I did read something about how they want to increase the SNSP from 75% to 95%, but are they doing anything about it? Is this an easy enough fix?