Nuclear - future for Ireland?

No you have not. All you have done is attempt to duck and weave out of answering.

You can whinge and cry until you are blue in the face and it`s not going to change anything. If you want an answer, as you have been told many times then answer the questions you were asked.

The two questions I asked are not - no ones knows -questions.

One is when renewables bid €0.00 for 100% of generation who generates what, at what price and what gets added to the consumers bills. It is happening at least a few times a month so we know what the percentages are as regards who gets paid what, and we know what that 100% €0.00 bid adds to the consumers bill.

AS to the other question, if those that do not favour nuclear can quote chapter and verse on timelines and cost for nuclear then it is more than reasonable imo that they should know what it is they favour and what it would cost.

The next election cycle is in 2030 and I cannot see voters being faced with emissions fines due to the failure of the policy we are pursuing being enamoured.

For steel, concrete, diesel and construction material it would be the same sauce for nuclear as renewables except that for nuclear they would be a once off cost where renewables would be hit by those increases at least twice more during the lifetime of a nuclear plant. Plus renewables would be a never ending cost repeated every 20 years.

As far as i understand the discussion from reading back - open to correction ofc - wind bids in at €0(but its not really zero because they'll get paid their agreed strike price anyway from whatever auctions they're under RESS or REFIT, between €75 and €100 / MWh approx). Let's say we have enough wind blowing to cover 100% of demand, but because of the grid renewables limits (SNSP, which they are hoping to push to 95% by 2031), the grid can only currently accept 75% wind. To provide the inertia needed to stabilise the grid for that last 25%, EirGrid is forced to rely on for example a gas plant, which bids in at let's say €120/MWh. Due to the single market rules, the most expensive generator needed to meet demand sets the price for everyone. So, the wind farms that sucessfully generated that 75% get paid the gas rate of €120/MWh instead of their €0 bid. But for newer RESS wind farms the € difference is clawed back into the PSO pot so they still only get their strike prices. Older REFIT contract ones get to keep the difference as i understand it.

Meanwhile, the remaining 25% of wind that was perfectly capable of generating but was forced to turn off by EirGrid receives a curtailment/constraint payment for sitting idle.

The effect on consumer bills is they pay premium fossil fuel prices for what should have been cheaper wind energy( Some but not all of that is clawed back as i said under RESS), and they pay an additional amount via PSO on the bill to compensate the wind farms that were forced to turn off.

That was longer than I thought!

I just saw your post and it`s a case of snap although until you mentioned it I had forgotten that those under REFIT would get the marginal price with no clawback.

Pretty much how I understand it as well, so if one of us is wrong then both of us are.

On the other hand if both of us are correct, I believe it goes a long way as to why nobody would answer what I was asking.

The same volume of gas would have been used if renewables had bid for the 75% they are limited too.

The difference would have been in what the consumer ended up not having to pay.

The 25% for "ghost electricity" that was not generated but was paid at the strike price and added to their bill.

by having 75% RES only the cheaper gas plants are dispatched which lowers the SMP.

Even with 100% gas we need spinning reserve.

Not all RES get the strike price. Thera plenty who didn’t get a RESS offer and went with a PPA

Isnt that the reason why more grid level storage is being introduced, as well as making the grid more resilient so it can handle the increase in renewables ..

Incidentally, as said before the same energy storage we're planning,and installing now , would also be needed if we went nuclear - both to cover spinning reserve.. but also nuclear generators work best at constant load - so middle of the night they're still putting out the same amount of power - at the same steady strike price -

Obviously the most efficient solution to this is load shifting..

The constraints due to our grid not being able to handle what it was not designed to do due to the push back of renewables on the grid that will require €20 billion to upgrade that they will not pay a cent towards ?

The same restraints where they won their €158 million in the High Court for back payment that we are currently appealing to the E.U. Court of Justice ?

Nuclear would not require spinning reserves to provide inertia. It would only require the spinning reserve for the output of the largest unit supplying the grid, not the largest nuclear facility. No different from any other source other than renewables would require spinning reserves to provide inertia.

You would be very unfortunate if two reactors went off line at the same time, but the 10% spinning reserves for renewables not being enough would be a more likely event as a sudden drop in wind or solar would not be confined to just one solar or wind farm. It would cover, if not all, then a large portion of them at the same time.

If a fault was found 2 reactors could be taking offline. If there is an issue in the substation or similar you could lose both.

What size reactors would you propose. And how many sites ?
we need to maintain N+1

you don’t seem to have an issue with gas plants getting capacity payments

A lot of the upgrades have to happen regardless. We are seen an increase in system load die to data centres, the electrification of heat and trasnport and general population growth.

Storm Eowyn caused €100M worth of damage, storms are getting worse and more frequent. Lines are at capacity.

Contrary to what some here may believe, neither am I. I`m interested in the figures as to what would give us the best bang for our buck and from what I see so far is that we are following a plan for 2050 that has failed as regards emissions targets where following it will not do any better and would not even cover our 2050 demand.

It`s not giving us the affordable electricity that the liberalization from monopolies was supposed to gives us. It`s just switched from one monopoly to another where states have no say, renewable companies dictate the terms and conditions and the consumer pays the price.

You ducked and dived with nothing but jargon which at the time I assumed was because answering would show up a few inconvenient truths you would rather avoid. From reading your posts today it appears I may have been wrong wrong and the real reason was you hadn`t a clue.

I would doubt the demand from data centers will drop. With AI, if the bubble doesn`t burst will more likely increase demand.

I am not sure on hydrogen either. Not long ago the next big thing globally was green hydrogen for export, but as far as I can see when the grant money or seed capital ran out a lot if not all of that just faded away. It`s at best around three times the cost for a car compared to electricity, and nobody seems prepared to put money into facilities to sell it to car owners. It`s conversion rate from electricity to hydrogen and back to electricity is around 3 units input to one unit output and no renewable company here is going to supply when they are getting their guaranteed strike price, so the electricity would have to be bought on the open market I imagine. It would be used here from what I understand, as a replacement for peaker plants so there would also be daily stand by fees. The U.K. strike price is €305 per MW, so not cheap.

I don`t see how we could stay on our current path and decouple from RES and storage unless the state 100% funded. The renewable companies, as they have recently shown, would just refuse to bid until they were given the terms and conditions they want. Which would just leave us back to paying a strike price for everything they generated even if we did not need or want it.

It would perhaps be possible for the state to fund it, but it would have to be owned 100% by the state. Orsted are 51% owned by Denmark, but they also refused to bid for Denmark`s largest ever offering of offshore citing the need to protect it`s other investors. Why Denmark pumped $9.7 billion into Orsted 8 months after they refused to bid makes no sense to me. It`s an extraordinary amount of money to safeguard the jobs of 3,700 people.

To each their own, but the average build time for a nuclear plant is around 8 years. Other than that for 40 years it would entail us being the reason for the other 32 years in not getting our act together. And as to setting the cost in stone for nuclear, it`s not as if the same is being applied to renewables. It seems more a case of their prices being set in quicksand. In the last four years the strike price for offshore wind in the U.K. has increased by 75%, 20% in the last two years alone.

Sizewell B gonna get 20 year extension

https://www.energylivenews.com/2026/06/11/sizewell-b-nuclear-plant-to-get-life-extension/

So 4x lifetime of offshore wind and 3x the capacity factor