Nuclear - future for Ireland?

That's a bit harsh on Australia mate. It's undoubtedly a strong accent, just ask anyone from Perth to say where they're from. But after a couple of months living there, they're reasonably understandable.

It's always interesting to see cherry-picked comparisons with Australia. If it's such a cheap place to build stuff, why haven't they built lots of cheap nuclear?

I thought it was coal that dominated their electricity generation fuel mix? Probably a topic for the Australia thread...

They have huge coal reserves, and more recently natural gas too, they had no real need to go down the nuclear route ..

The Australian market is interesting - you could hardly call the distribution system a "grid" given how poorly connected it is - resulting in significant discrepancies in wholesale prices across the country because of the size of the place. South Australia provides an interesting case study: from 1% to 75% wind/solar in 16 years, regularly hitting at days of 100% wind/solar including a world record 10 day stretch last December. They have no hydrogen, nuclear or any of that messing and not much battery - it's pretty much all wind and solar. Plenty of the crypto-climate-change-deniers on here would have you convinced this was simply impossible. But it proves that simply by over-provisioning cheap and available tech like wind and solar, you can eliminate 90% of fossil generation at a reasonable cost.

South Australia had one of the worst renewables triggered power failures ever in 2016, due to over reliance on an intermittent source. It was estimated to have cost SA business $367 million in losses.

There aren't too many Australian states rushing to copy SAs fantastic energy reliability record.

Funny you should say they have not much battery. The one they built in response to the 2016 disaster was the largest in the world in 2017.

If you are a fan of Ireland's planning system - I am not - then consider that when SA had it's 2016 renewables energy disaster and they identified they needed a big battery, it took a single year to go from the disaster to switching on the battery. I doubt you could do it in ten years here.

As for the energy minister using a lack of a nuclear industry as an excuse, that was not the conclusion of parliamentary enquiry and report on the topic, which had over 300 submissions to it.

The irony in that comment is that the Defence Minister and Prime Minister don't see a lack of a nuclear industry as an obstacle to Australia acquiring a fleet of nuclear powered submarines from the US. Once upon a time Australia didn't have a submarine building industry or expertise so it just went ahead and acquired both. Typical duplicitous politician spinning nonsense to fit his preferred narrative.

That's a bit optimistic don't you think? The Germans have been waffling about with their Energiewende since 1980 and they're still hopelessly reliant on fossil fuels. Seems like all they have to show for the last 50 years of failed policies is sky high electricity bills and a lot of dead birds and bats. And unless the laws of physics and thermodynamics have changed recently, these renewables won't be producing usable power when the weather is not co-operating.

Maybe we should look at policies and technologies that actually have a proven track record of de-carbonisation. Like ... oh, I don't know ... nuclear energy? Which the French have used to produce almost no CO2 from their power grid since the mid 20th century?

"Germany. I've no time for their policies."

Don't believe the US originated climate-change denialism lies and FUD. Most of this anti-Energiewende propaganda has been pumped out by the likes of Koch brothers backed "think tanks" and other right-wing mouthpieces in the US with a strong incentive to discredit any attempt to move away from fossil fuels.

There are no actual statistics or numbers which back up the claim that Energiewende has failed. Every interesting statistic about the German electricity market points in the opposite direction since Energiewende - increased self-reliance, increased reliability, decreased carbon intensity and decreased wholesale prices.

Until around 2000, Germany was persistently reliant on electricity imports to make up for shortfalls in generation. Last year they were the biggest EXPORTER of electricity in the world - and this happened in the middle of a gas crisis which many were gleefully predicting would destroy Germany.

In the thirty years since 1990, Germany GDP has increased by 150% while Greenhouse gas emissions have fallen by over 45%. Carbon intensity of electricity production has dropped from 510g/kWh to currently around 240g - although last year saw a big temporary jump to deal with the NG crisis - but the overall term trend is clear.

The reliability of the German electricity system (generation, transmission and distribution) as measured by SAIDI (system average interruption) is easily the best of any large country in the the world at about 11 minutes of interuption per year per customer - it has improved steadily through-out the course of the Energiewende - for example, in 2015 it was nearly 22 minutes of interruption per year. For comparison, in the US, it's an hour and 50 minutes and that is the number "without major events" (which most other countries include) - the "major events" component amounted to 5 hours of interruption per customer in the USA in 2022.

Electricity prices for consumers are relatively high in Germany but this has nothing to do with the cost of production. This was the case 40 years ago, just like it's the case now because traditionally Germany has taxed electricity consumption heavily. Wholesale prices in Germany, which reflect production costs, are pretty much the European average and have fallen (admittedly not dramatically) over the decades since Energiewende became policy.

When you step back and think about it, the idea that Germans, with their strong engineering and technocratic culture would continue with failed policies for decade after decade, is daft. The idea that knuckle-dragging crypto-climate change denialists on the internet who wouldn't know a MWh from a MW, think they have more insight into energy technology and markets than Germans working in the field is actually laughable. Meanwhile the Germans quietly just get on with producing more and more electricity, cheaper, more reliably, replacing aging and expensive-to-maintain thermal plant (lignite and nuclear) with newer cheaper technology.

Your praise for Germany is beyond bizarre, considering that they didn't see any danger in making themselves energy-dependent on a maniacal, genocidal dictator bent on creating an empire by carving up Europe by force ... Germany above all countries given their history should have seen the danger of dealing with someone like Putler. Instead, they couldn't build gas pipelines to Putlers 4th Reich fast enough.

And I don't know if you're suggesting that German electricity taxes having nothing to do with the Energiewende in particular or environmental policy in general. It would be bizarre to do this if the energy is so "cheap" especially when there is a desire to get people using electric stuff. Electric cars, electrically operated air-pump heaters etc.

Your explanation also doesn't explain why other countries and states that have followed similar policies have similarly stupidly high energy costs. Denmark has the most expensive electricity in the world, and in the U.S. "blue" states like California tend to have the highest energy costs.

These technologies are inherently expensive and problematic in a variety of ways. And the intermittency problem is fatal unless and until some killer energy storage solution emerges that can be done at a sane cost and at very high scale.

As to @Busman Paddy Lastys point that Ireland is a small country, it should be remembered that we are only short distance away from one of the largest economies on Earth (the UK) and a longer (but still feasible for interconnection purposes) from another (France).

Because they didn't have enough nuclear reactors or gas reserves. Frozen wind turbines didn't help. Bit like Ireland under ER.

The 2021 Texas grid failure is is not an argument for or against nuclear power. It's an argument in favour of investment in infrastructure, and an argument against isolationism.

The USA is served by three electricity grids - a Western grid, an Eastern grid... and a Texas grid. The reason is that the State of Texas did not want Federal "interference" in its energy system. As a result, Texas has the shoddiest, cheapest-built electricity system of any developed country, with limited interconnection to the two of the world's largest-capacity electricity distribution systems. This is by choice. Because Texas.

Nuclear power wouldn't have helped in 2021, because Nuclear cannot ramp up fast enough for the demand of 20+ million turning up their electric heating - the most likely scenario would still be a grid shutdown due to overloading; the nuclear power plants would keep running, but they would effectively have been cut off from their load.

The lesson is really that electrical grids are resilient at scale, and scale is more important than the type of generation used.

We're our own special grid here in Ireland (it covers the whole island), but that's for obvious geographical reasons, rather than political ideology. That still leaves us vulnerable to a Texas-style problem, although we have a much higher ratio of interconnector capacity than Texas has. Right now, we interconnect only with the UK mainland, but we are building high capacity connections to France. The connection to France is a big deal, because for the first time it will directly link Ireland with the enormous European Synchronous Area for the first time - right now, all electricity we import into Ireland from European generation is first transited through the British National Grid.