"Green" policies are destroying this country

Nuclear will never happen in Ireland as I already explained.

Wind and solar are part of a grid. We will never be only using wind and solar. Nobody I have seen has ever said as much.

To give you all a surprise, I have no problem with using nuclear but it would have to be at least 200km away from my house in a big circle. I would say everyone else in Ireland will say the same.

Again I will ask the same question, has anyone said we will end up with a grid based just on wind and solar?

I don't need to go back a few pages to find your curated numbers.

12th June this year - System Alert issued. The cause: no wind, little solar.

15th November this week - System Alert issued. The cause:little wind, no solar.

I already provided by argument. If you read the posts. Nobody has countered how to resolve the issues I raised.

Ireland has released a document which was earlier on this thread and it lists how the government plans to handle energy requirements.

So they can sit at zero too?

Great idea.

Maybe we should go for a two tiered system.

Those who want their solar/wind powered dreams, no matter the cost and are happy to be occasionally disconnected due to intermittency and volatile pricing on Tariff A.

Those who would rather secure, dependable conventional generation at market cost, seasonal pricing volatility, with rare or no threat of disconnection on Tariff B.

I wonder which Tariff would be more popular?

You and your cohort are welcome to finance your dreams as long as you want, but you can pay for it. Leave the rest of us out of it. We'll happily chuck in a few quid for whatever fines they dream up along the way - as long as everyone else globally who hasn't signed up for Tariff A pays the same too.

Speaking of batteries, has the motor industry sorted out yet how to dispose of EV batteries?

Nuclear is hideously expensive. Here's a list of the most expensive nuclear power plants in the world:

Go through them one by one ... they are all multi-unit plants, each unit 1GW+ at a cost of $4 to $6 billion per GW. In other words you would get 18 to 28 GW for the price of Eamon Ryan's 37 GW of wind turbines. At 40% capacity factor his turbines would produce the equivalent of 15 GW continuous ... but intermittently and with a highly complicated hydrogen infrastructure to be able to supply baseload power.

Ryan makes the most expensive nuclear look cheap. Now consider:

• Ryan's €100 billion estimate is almost certainly way too low;
• We have not considered any economies of scale associated with building several multi-unit nuclear plants;
• Nuclear plants have design lives of up to 80 years compared to 20 for offshore wind turbines

We start to see that "hideously expensive" nuclear starts to look cheap compared to Ryan's crackpot plans. There are two other problems to address: refuelling/maintenance downtime and reactor inflexibility. The first problem only requires that there are enough units in the nuclear fleet so that maintenance can be staggered. Ireland's power needs for 2050 are high enough for this to be the case. We would need perhaps three or four 4-unit plants containing gigawatt class units. Typical refuelling downtime is 25-30 days every 18 months. Spread across, say, sixteen units it's the equivalent of a single extra unit of capacity.

The second problem of inflexibility is overhyped. Current reactor designs are capable of considerable damping and ramping. This would still allow a sensible amount of renewables to be accommodated (because those of us who are not zealots recognise that a mix of low-carbon options is sensible and desirable):

The above is based on a paper by Jenkins et al. available here.

Note, all of this is based on reactor designs that exist and are deployed at scale today and includes the AP-1000 and EPR designs. It doesn't depend on any new-tech. If we allow ourselves just a little imagination, both of those designs have scope for simplification and cost reduction. And that's before we consider any novelties such as molten salt reactors which can run at higher temperatures and are suitable for use with Moltex, a similar approach as Concentrated Solar Power in the use of molten salt thermal storage to smooth the diurnal power requirement cycle. This also opens possibilities of further decarbonisation through the provision of industrial process heat, as well as district space heating which would offset the need for all those madcap air-coupled heat pumps.

Ireland could happily manage with three nuclear plants located close to major population centres. Compare that to thousands of wind turbines spread across literally tens of thousands of square kilometres with the associated grid connections and servicing. I frankly don't believe the latter is achievable for any amount of money. We are too isolated to be able to depend on tens of GW of intermittent power.

LOL. Even your mathematics is not that poor that you do not know his figure is comically low and even at that is 3 times the price of what nuclear would cost based on Finland`s latest nuclear power plant.

Based on current U.K. prices it would not even come close to covering the offshore part of the 37GW plan if it was for just fixed platforms never mind the floating platforms and all the hydrogen add ons.

Still good to see he at least came up with something even if he did pull it out of thin air. I`m sure like myself you are eagerly looking forward to his breakdown as to how he came up with that figure ?

Greens are either not really concerned about emissions or they have for decaded painted themselves into a corner on nuclear that they now do not know how to get out off without looking foolish.

For electricity we need a dependable energy source to provide a baseload. After that they could play around with undependable intermitten renewables all the like.

The 37GW plan is financial lunacy which leave us with gas as a baseload for ever and a day, with our energy security depending on the continuing goodwill of Norway plus increased use of LNG.