Nuclear - future for Ireland?

Really?? Can you post that in terms of what Germany gets compared to other conventional based grids for energy exports

Targets my ar$e - as I mentioned earlier this state is decades behind on targets for water quality, habitat protection etc. In any case building more useless wind farms isn't going to achieve much in the way of any targets since the government is now having to scramble to find extra conventional power capacity to keep the lights on thanx to their own clueless developer led greenwash energy policies.

I know a lot of people with solar installs, solar with battery supplies 100% of their electricity in the summer and about 50% or more in the winter. In the summer many are giving their surplus to the grid. A substantial amount of the housing stock could do the same and this maximises the efficiency of the installed solar capacity.

Any discussion of renewables vs nuclear that ignores solar is not an accurate picture. The ambition set by the Irish state for solar is very low and doesn't seek to install solar on every house where it is viable meaning it will fail to make a useful contribution unless more money is invested in it and more ambitious target are set.

Solar is commercially pointless at this latitude, and that goes several times over due to Ireland's very high degree of cloud cover. There is no economic case for solar in Ireland. No commercial entity will builld capacity without long term contracts subsidised heavily by the taxpayer - which means greater energy costs fo the populace. The Germans have had the most expensive energy bills in Europe because of huge levies placed on bills to pay for wind and solar subsidies that were necessary to get them built out.

Energy is needed 24/7/365. Solar can only approach name plate capacity for 15% of the hours in a year. For that remaining 35%, solar only manages to produce at 18% of it's rated capacity. And goes on and off like a hazard light if clouds with gaps are blowing overhead. it must be an absolute nightmare for grid managers.

A cheap but 85% unreliable car is not a bargain, it's a burden.

If there were really cheap and reliable storage, it might make sense, if you could prove slave labour wasn't involved.

The grid is not a battery and there is no meaningful storage.

On a day like today there is a surplus of wind supply which as was pointed out before makes solar the complement of wind.

And a happy Dunkelflaute to all dreamers.

One problem that is very apparent for Ireland is the suboptimal nature of most of the installed wind capacity. Eirgrid's strangle hold on connections and its auction system for those slots means that much of Ireland installed wind capacity is sited in suboptimal locations scattered wherever Eirgrid has a suitable hook up point. This means that much of Irelands installed capacity is producing at far below its full potential wasting time, money and resources for everyone. The same is likely to be the case for much of the installed solar capacity. Cloud cover can be brutal in some area but on the east coast out to the midlands its much lower.

Until the Eirgrid monopoly is broken this will continue to be the case for future installed capacity of both wind and solar.

For a Comparison its informative to compare this to N.Ireland where all the wind capacity is sited in the most strategically advantageous locations.

Look, there is no use my engaging with you because you are basically dishonest. A few posts back you gave the cost of the UAEs nuclear plant as €40 B, when it's half that. The other $20b is over the next 60 years of operational life and has not been spent. You talk of fossil fuels needed as backup to nuclear, which is needed once in a blue moon, but will blithely tout gas as an obvious backup for intermittents - required frequently - but you don't call it fossil fuel then, oh no. You also ignore all comparative costings from Lazard that I have provided, who are so authoritative I have seen them quoted in academic papers.

So pose all the questions you want, I'm not intereested in dealing with your cute approach to discourse.

Nuclear. if we started next year, would see us virtually zero CO2 free by 2032 - 18 years, or nearly two decades sooner, than the 2050 target.

If you believe in AGW, that ought to be a good thing, as China, India, Indonesia, Pakistan, Brazil, Nigeria, Bangladesh, Russia, Mexico, et al, won't be reducing their CO2 emissions within 100 years.

Because Nuclear is zero CO2? - something we don't have a realistic plan for. We have 2050 hopium based on no known storage tech, which is little more than wishful thinking.

As for Ireland being incapable of nuclear because the Irish are what they are; well you are probably right - not that I'd be too proud of that win.

Pumped storage is about as envonmentally destructive as it gets. I'm pro environment so completely against such China Gorges dam like envirovandalism and social upheaval.

Turlough hill provides 292 MW, briefly. How many of those would be needed here, to fill the gap?:

Any more jokes, that one was ok?

Another advantage of renewables is that it has massive resilience against outages since multiple individual farms or turbines can go down without significantly impacting the overall capacity. The same can not be said of the 2 reactors which Ireland could realistically build. If one goes down you lose 50% of your capacity and there is a very good chance that some outages will take down both at the same time.

Care to back up that statement on solar and wind being complimentary??

Have you noticed how secretive the real costs of renewables seem to be? When trying to find the real costs here, and even more so ones announced for Ireland, the cost is usually not given. They will tell you MWs, and tons of CO2 avoided and that wonderful thousand of homes metric, but almost never what it's costing.

Leaving that aside, the East Anglia One windfarm has a declared cost of £2.5b for 714 MW. That's $3.395b; divide 4.1 by 0.714 and you get 5.7422969..; 3.395*5.7422969=19.495, so I'd say your rationale is sunk. There must be other undisclosed sources of funds or they are just lying.

Offshore wind is more expensive than non EU built nuclear , even before looking at 50% capacity factors, and that tallies with the Internationa Energy Agency figures that have European offshore wind costing more then nuclear:

https://www.iea.org/reports/projected-costs-of-generating-electricity-2020

And it is really so much worse than that, because the life expectancy is a derisory 20 years. So if offshore wind is fully 50% more expensive than Barakh nuclear, where I failed to take account of the 40 year life expectancy discrepancy, then offshore wind is actually going to be more like 150% more expensive than nuclear, allowing for Barakh's future costs of a further $20b over the next 60 years.

Also note that utility scale solar in Europe is about the same LCOE as nuclear - fancy that, but that makes it more expensive by a wide margin due to inadequacies in using LCOE.

This endless argument that nuclear is significantly more expensive than renewables is dishonest and deceitful. LCOE needs to be scrapped as a concept applied to measuring renewables as it does not include any costing of the energy required to fill the holes. We need a different benchmark that realistically reflects a technologies total costs to deliver power 24/3/365 and which includes life expectancy.

No I am not forgetting the $49.4b deal - you are. $24.4b has been spent leaving a further $25b to go. my $20b was off the cuff and doesn't materially change anything, so large is the cost discrepancy between the Barakh nuclear cost vs offshore wind. Fuel isn't a significant cost with nuclear. Looks like the 20 year lifespan figure was incorrect, so it's back to being just 50% more expensive.

LCOE favours renewables, because it does not include the cost of filling in all the holes.

There was a proposal called "Spirit of Ireland" which set out the principles. It was mainly based upon storing massive wind capacity, but also was intended to form pumped storage for the EU grid buying in cheap overnight grid over capacity and selling it back at peak times.