Europe has a problem with energy security. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has resulted in volatile prices for oil and natural gas, and has highlighted the EU’s vulnerability to physical constraints on energy supply.
This is not a new problem: electricity transmission networks were initially national since each country built its own grid and little attention was paid to transnational interconnection.
Neighbouring countries often have demand peaks that do not fully coincide and there are opportunities for profitable trade.
The invasion of Ukraine has also drawn attention to the dangerous reliance on imports of natural gas from Russia
Recent reports from the European Commission have urged higher investment in interconnection, including links to potential supplies of power from north Africa’s solar resources.
The invasion of Ukraine has also drawn attention to the dangerous reliance on imports of natural gas from Russia, and several countries have built new importation terminals to facilitate seaborne supplies of liquefied natural gas (LNG) from the US and elsewhere.
US natural gas prices are half the level in the European wholesale market and production is rising. If Donald Trump’s advice to “drill, baby, drill” is heeded, the differential could persist and even widen.
Nuclear
There is also a realisation that the retreat from nuclear power generation – whose uranium fuel is largely insulated from geopolitical risk – has been overdone and many new projects are planned following decades in which none were built.
Nuclear provides ‘always-on’ power and is now seen as a complementary technology for intermittent wind and solar. There are concerns about capital cost overshoots but new technologies are in development which may turn out to be more affordable.
The most dramatic policy shift was in Germany. Europe’s largest economy commenced the phasing-out of its nuclear plants under the government of Gerhard Schroder in the 1990s, a coalition of his Social Democrat party with the Greens.
The phase-out was completed more recently under Angela Merkel’s government when long-term reliance on Russian gas was seen as attractive and an expensive pipeline through the Baltic was constructed. It was never used. Schroder signed up as a main board director of Russian energy giant Gazprom when his term in government ended, and is now a deeply unpopular figure in Germany and has been stripped of his privileges as an ex-chancellor.
Nuclear stations only 20 years old (they can last 50 years and longer) were closed prematurely under Merkel in the aftermath of the tsunami at Fukushima in Japan, which damaged a nuclear plant on the coast, flooding the auxiliary power plant and causing a prolonged shutdown.
Some of the nuclear stations closed under Merkel were in Germany’s southwest, 500km from either the Atlantic or the Mediterranean and hardly a tsunami risk.
The ‘ban’ on nuclear is even enshrined in legislation dating from 1999, before the invasion of Ukraine revived support for nuclear in many European countries
There are no nuclear plants in Ireland, north or south, and there are no LNG importation terminals. The system relies instead on gas and electricity imported from the UK with a further electricity interconnector to France in the works, as well as oil and coal imported through the seaports. Even though electricity generated in UK nuclear plants is imported through the interconnectors (it cannot be identified since electrons do not carry identity papers) the fiction is maintained that Ireland has no reliance on nuclear power.
This is simply not true – the UK is planning to relax regulatory constraints on new nuclear plants and more may be constructed in due course. The ‘ban’ on nuclear is even enshrined in legislation dating from 1999, before the invasion of Ukraine revived support for nuclear in many European countries.
Separately from the 1999 legislation, there has been no movement either on developing an LNG importation terminal, even as several EU countries have been hurrying to diversify their supply possibilities. The first proposal, over 20 years ago, for a plant at Tarbert on the Shannon estuary was blocked and An Bord Pleanála turned down a revised plan in 2023, notwithstanding a Government report on energy security which acknowledged the precariousness of current pipeline dependence on UK supplies.
As with so many other areas requiring actual decisions, the Programme for Government released last week has nothing specific to say, aside from vague generalities. The programme promises to “scale up investment in critical infrastructure and in our electricity grid which will be advantageous for customers”.
The opposition to building a nuclear power station made sense on economic grounds back in the 1970s when the minimum scale, 1,000 megawatts and more, appeared simply too big for the Irish system and the capital costs looked prohibitive. Smaller units may become available in the decades ahead and at lower costs.
Opposition to the LNG importation unit on the Shannon estuary never made economic sense and sought to deny that some reduced reliance on natural gas is likely to be needed indefinitely. It is now time to reconsider both of these decisions, LNG first, and nuclear if emerging technologies bring the costs down.
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