Nuclear Holidays

Every year hundreds of thousands of Irish people holiday in France, as I am this week. And every year we experience the deep down dread in our Irish eco-souls as we lie awake in our gites wondering if the nuclear power station next door will explode. Actually, I made that last bit up. Let's face it, 99.9% of Irish holiday makers in France don't give a second thought to French nuclear power, blissfully ignorant of the risks they are taking. Myself, I'm here in Antibes, well within the fallout zone from not one but four nuclear power stations at Tricastin in idyllic Provence. Strange how you get used to things ...

Back in Ireland we are embarking on an 'energy first' of our own: ramping up the share of renewable energy (i.e.: wind, for all practical purposes) beyond anything tried anywhere else in the world. As the ESRI noted in a recent paper on the Government's energy and climate policies, the current target requires that wind delivers 20-25% of all our electricity generation by 2020, which is "a large multiple of the level of wind penetration actually achieved in any functioning power system with weak interconnection, and is also a multiple of targets enunciated in other countries."

Moreover, such a level of exposure to an intermittent power source demands a significant backup or baseload power generation resource. Nuclear is ideal for this purpose (regardless of its other limitations), so is gas. So maybe we need to build an interconnector to France before 2020; or outsource our electricity generation requirements to EdF? Of course, if the lights start going out over Ireland on a frosty, winter's day when the wind doesn't blow (as on February 16th this year) then we might all be happy to move to France to cuddle up to a nice nuclear power station ...

Tyranny of the Installed Base

The ESB got a lot of publicity for their announcement yesterday that they will invest €22 billion over the next twelve years in a plan which "will establish ESB as a world class renewables company, makes emissions reduction and energy efficiency central to its ambitious targets". Now €22 billion is a lot of money to you, me and our next door neighbours, but let's keep it in perspective: it's less than the amount Irish consumers borrowed just to buy houses over the past sixteen months. Frankly, €22 billion over 12 years is simply not enough relative to the scale of the task that we face.

More worrying perhaps is the ESB's politically correct plan that:

By 2020, ESB will be delivering one-third of its electricity from renewable generation. This will include over 1,400 megawatts of wind generation, in addition to wave, tidal and biomass. To promote this, the company will invest in emerging green technologies.

Now I'm all in favour of renewable, clean technology: let a thousand wind turbines bloom and all that. But it simply isn't enough. First of all, most of the ESB's 1,400 megawatts is going to come from wind generation. The token genuflection towards wave and tidal is just that: a wishful prayer to imaginary abstractions that simply don't exist yet. If you don't believe me read the European Commission's Technology Map report that was prepared as an input into its Strategy Energy Technology Plan. Ocean power is up their with nuclear fusion: a great idea whose time has not yet come and won't for the foreseeable future.

So back to wind: and that's the scary bit. Go to Eirgrid's web site and click on the Wind Generation Chart. Then use the little calendar application to pull up data for Saturday, 16th February 2008 (that's right, last month). During the entire day of the 16th February, our installed wind generation capacity of over 1,000 megawatts was unable to supply even as much as 80 megawatts of electricity - or 8% of capacity. And in 12 year's time ESB wants to expose one third of its generation capacity to wind. You see the problem?

As I've noted before, we face daunting energy challenges - demanding radical innovations in how we generate, distribute and use energy. The ESB's politically correct bromide does not rise to that challenge, rather it dodges the big issue: nuclear power. In the short term we can hope that one or more East-West interconnectors with the UK mainland grid will keep our lights on when the wind doesn't blow (after 2012 anyway). But the UK faces its own energy challenges - and there is no guarantee that they will have any 'spare' capacity to send our way in ten year's time.

Matt Cooper has a thoughtful opinion piece in today's Irish Examiner setting out the case for nuclear power in Ireland - or at least the need to debate it. But in the end I think we will be victims of what in the IT sector they call 'the tyranny of the installed base'. In other words, if you and all your colleagues are used to IBM hardware and Microsoft software then it's hard to change to something else. In the case of energy, we face the tyranny of an installed base of coal and gas fired power stations and an expanding wind sector. We need them - but we also need the base load, non-fossil fuel, non-wind dependent certainty of nuclear power. We'll get British nuclear power over the interconnector to begin with, but ultimately we'll have to generate our own.

Unfortunately that's when our problems will really start. Ireland's biggest problem regarding nuclear power is that we don't already have it. In other words, we don't have the engineers, suppliers, know-how and networks that would help us expand to meet demand. It takes more effort (energy if you will) to get from nought to sixty than from sixty to one hundred.

And by the way: only one company - in Japan - has a near global monopoly on manufacturing key components of nuclear power stations - and they have back orders out to 2015. Maybe we should place our orders now and have our debate in the meantime? The queue's only going to get longer. A lot longer.