"Green" policies are destroying this country

So it is in no way related to any unique vulnerability of nuclear power stations, as your dishonest and patently disinformative post appears to imply.

It's just jellyfish. They sometimes appear in swarms on our beaches. They are a common hazard to all power plant cooling systems since Jamie Watt invented the steam condensor in 1769. A bit like birds flying into wind turbines.

"It's a known problem that should be preventable given the extraordinary capital investment in nuclear"

So it seems it's not now "nuclear" incompetence, nor penny pinching.

After 250 years of dealing with biological fouling of marine condensors in thermal power plants (long before nuclear), I would say that some fine brains and investement have developed such systems to minimise fouling to the point where "should be preventable" is a moot point. I am very familiar with power station cooling water systems and intake screening.

The problem is however, not the system itself, but the "100 year flood" where freak quantities can overwhelm the maximum design capacity of the system., causing a plant shutdown. This possibility has to be and is planned for, as all other events which may cause full power station soft shut-downs or sudden trips.

However, I will concede that the spinning reserve to back up the tripping of say a 2,000 MW plant like Ringhals in Sweden (where I once stood in the reactor containment building, many years ago ! ) is considerable, and as such its size is a disadavantage.

This is where the Small Modular Reactor with outputs of 250MW or less will come into its own, and will require equivalently much less spinning reserve.

:)

It's like good-cop-bad-cop on here (not to mention troll-cop who continually spams the board with press releases). We have one guy denigrating nuclear, the world's second largest source of low carbon power after hydro, and the largest in advanced economies. Then we have another promoting hopium in the form of hydrogen. Thermal generation using hydrogen from electrolysis is 19% efficient. With fuel cells it rises to 30%. What level of excess capacity do you have to build to support that? What will it cost? The deafening silence whenever those questions are asked (after 715 pages on this thread) says all you need to know.

Yeah, nothing to see here. A 2.5 km landslide of a million tonnes of peat which poisoned the drinking water supply of a sizable town and killed 50,000 wild trout. If it was an oil spill we'd have hysterical activists gluing themselves to public buildings and flinging soup at national treasures. But nah, this was a GREEN project. A minor embarrassment to be forgotten asap. The EU wouldn't have been involved at all except for the pesky local community who went to Brussels to complain. This was the same community who had been ridden roughshod over twice during the planning process which later turned out to be defective. After the landslide the Irish courts imposed a derisory €1,250 fine on the construction company before the EU got involved. Many years later, though, the cosy cartel between spineless politicians and Big Wind has only gotten worse.

It's hardly a backstop if it's the only option.

Do you have evidence for the near-term arrival of this hopium? Have a look at GE's info on hydrogen-fueled gas turbines. If you read all of it, including the small print, it's clearly someone who wants to be part of a race in which nobody yet knows if there's going to be a winner. For larger turbines the technology to get them to 50% hydrogen is still in the lab. Retrofitting involves replacement of numerous plant safety systems. It's pretty clear that unless a plant is "hydrogen ready" to begin with (the term bandied around by ER lately), retrofitting won't be possible. We can replace all our gas plants over time, of course, but it won't be cheap or quick. That is why the IAE refers to "decades".

Fortunately we don't have to guess about the proportion of wind for hydrogen generation as the ESB has already presented a plan. It's half of the proposed 30 GW of floating offshore wind. It goes without saying that there is no chance whatsoever of any FLOW being built here by 2030. In my opinion we're unlikely to even get the 6 GW of fixed bottom turbines off the east coast (or is it 7 GW or 8 GW? I've lost track -- it was 3.5 GW just a couple of years ago: the Greens keep adding fictional capacity as they flounder on their other plans).

Nobody has the slightest idea of the costs. How could they? -- it's 400 times bigger than the world's largest FLOW farm due to be completed at the end of this year. To say Ireland has delusions of grandeur would be an understatement. We have no infrastructure to support any of this, the companies with the expertise are leaving the country in droves because our planning is a shambles, our onshore wind is three times more expensive than other countries offshore wind, we're the only country that's been prosecuted for the environmental damage caused by a wind farm ... the list goes on.

Our most recent onshore wind was €98/MWh. Please explain how you multiply that by 2.5 and get £93.25. Your factor of 2.5 is misguided in any case. That only accounts for the round-trip energy efficiency of hydrogen storage. In other words, a 2.5x increase in costs only accounts for the extra wind generation required. It accounts for absolutely none of the extra costs involved in storage, rebuilding of thermal plant, and a host of infrastructure costs. Think of it this way -- a thermal plant operator today charges for fuel costs, operating costs, depreciating plant costs, finance costs, and their own profit and risk margins. Only one of those costs, albeit a large one (the fuel) is eliminated when powered by hydrogen. The wind generator, the electrolyser, the thermal plant operator, the storage and pipeline operators -- all of those must get their cut in order for operation to be economically viable. Quite obviously none of it is free. The impact on final generation cost is way more than merely the 2.5x required to cover efficiency losses.

Costs of all of those items are also going to rise. And there is some weird "Ireland factor" that makes everything vastly more expensive here. It has been noted many times in the past but nobody has ever managed to tame it. Our dimwit-in-chief, ER explained the RESS-2 prices as a result of inflation:

"according to the IEA, prices for many raw materials and freight costs have been on an increasing trend since the beginning of 2021. By March 2022, the price of PV-grade polysilicon more than quadrupled, steel increased by 50%, copper rose by 70%, aluminum doubled and freight costs rose almost 5-fold. The reversal of the long-term trend of decreasing costs is reflected in the higher prices of wind turbines and PV modules, as manufacturers pass through increased equipment costs. Surging freight costs are the biggest contributor to overall price increases for onshore wind. For solar PV, the impact is more evenly divided among elevated prices for freight, polysilicon and metals".

This is supposed to explain how our prices for onshore wind soared by 33% in two years. However, as you rightly point out, the price for UK offshore wind fell dramatically over a similar period. And while ER spun this as still being cheaper than gas (btw, it isn't any more) he neglected to point out that both the high gas price and wind price is equally fatal to the economy if sustained. Thing is: the gas price can fall and indeed already has, while the wind price is locked in. Maybe you can explain all this better than I can? If you're going to use £37.5/MWh as your base price you'll need to explain how exactly this is going to translate to Irish floating offshore wind, when our onshore costs are already 2.5x higher?

If I understand this right, you are saying we can use existing depleted gas fields (e.g. Kinsale?) for hydrogen storage. You do realise all the platforms and infrastructure there have been decommissioned and dismantled? More importantly, you seem to be saying that we don't have to worry about cushion gas because it's already there in the depleted field? That's incorrect. The viability of hydrogen storage depends on being able to get the gas out of storage at the rate it is required for generation. The extraction rate depends on storage pressure and falls off exponentially with decreasing pressure. Depleted fields like Kinsale were abandoned precisely because the pressure drive had diminished beyond commerciality. With a natural province like Kinsale you also have no control over the connected volumes of the reservoir. Storage suitability is established by pumping gas in and seeing what comes back out. For example, the US National Helium Reserve took 37 years from the discovery of one particular salt dome to finally designating it as suitable for storage.

Yes they do. They are included in the two-year investigation currently under way.

Look, I get it. We'd all like low-carbon energy that is cheap, uncomplicated, and near term. Unfortunately, no such option exists. Neither hydrogen storage nor nuclear is a panacaea. Both are likely decades away before we really know how things will pan out. In the mean time we have to keep the lights on with what we've got. My overriding fear is that Eamon Ryan has his mad starey eyes fixed on the hydrogen future and will do all in his power to undermine the fossil fuel infrastructure on which we currently depend.

"Big Wind" are the financiers sucking on the public tit in their quest for subsidies. Turbine manufacturers on the other hand are equipment and services suppliers, analogous to Schlumberger for "Big Oil". Siemens and GE are reputable companies with highly varied lines of business. The fact that they can no longer manufacture products at prices that even public service wastoids will purchase is not their fault. It's a reflection of the fact that even with giant public subsidies, "Big Wind" was struggling to be economically viable.

This was explained to you before. Those companies don't set the price of oil. They are price takers in a cyclical business where the up years pay for a lot of bad ones. They took massive losses as recently as 2020. They also fund the new technology that keeps the world supplied with the hydrocarbons that civilisation depends on. Oil and gas fields peak and decline continually. Without ongoing investment in them the world economy goes into reverse. Green policies deter the necessary investments and lead to higher prices ... followed by the inevitable whining about windfall profits.

By the way, there are no private oil companies in the world's top ten by market cap. Saudi Aramco are the only one that make the list, and another state enterprise PetroChina joins them in the top five list by revenue. The biggest company by market cap (though that may not be true in 2023) and the most profitable is Apple, who use Chinese sweatshop labour to make iPhones -- a commodity they do set the price of. Last time I checked, they weren't making a product that the existence of humanity depends on.

As far as I know it will still have a 20 year sunset clause.

Fair enough. On the other hand, your "ever faster ramp up in renewables once the exit is completed" is a non sequitur. Renewables are not being held back by litigious fossil fuel explorers, but by their own limitations.