OVER the years of listening to Philippine nuclear energy fanboys trying desperately to convince themselves and the public that adopting nuclear power somehow makes sense for this country, there have been some ridiculous assertions made. The one that hit the news over the weekend, however, is absolutely the best one so far. And by “best,” I mean “so hilarious I almost suffocated from laughing so hard.”

At the Pandesal Forum in Quezon City last Friday, Gayle Certeza, the lead convenor of the nuclear energy fan club Alpas Pilipinas, lamented the high cost of electricity in the Philippines.

“Our businesses are very much affected. Many of our investors may pull out from the Philippines because of the high cost of electricity here. So, when Bangladesh operates its nuclear power plants, many of our factories may go to them because of cheaper power cost,” Certeza said.

The solution to this, according to Certeza, who was joined by Rep. Mark Cojuangco of the House Special Committee on Nuclear Energy, is for the Philippines to adopt nuclear energy, now na, preferably by resurrecting the never-operated and longmummified Bataan Nuclear Power Plant (BNPP), which is apparently the sole reason for Congressman Cojuangco’s existence. If the government began work on the BNPP immediately, Conjuangco said, the rehabilitation work would take about four years, and it could be switched on before the end of President Marcos Jr.’s term.

The project in Bangladesh that has the nuclear advocates worried that the country will soon be stealing away investments meant for the Philippines is a twin 1,200-megawatt (1,030 MW net) unit plant being built at Rooppur, on the banks of the Ganges River, about 160 kilometers northwest of Dhaka. The plant is a Russian design, using two VVER-1200 pressurized water reactors (PWR), which are, as nuclear reactors go, fairly conventional and reliable. The project, which has been proposed since the early 1960s before Bangladesh was even an independent country, got underway in earnest in 2017 at an initial cost of $12.5 billion, of which a total of $11.9 billion was loaned to Bangladesh by the Russian government.

As NPP projects go, the Rooppur plant has proceeded fairly smoothly, which is all the more surprising considering it’s being built in Bangladesh, a country quite properly regarded by the rest of the world, albeit sympathetically, as a complete basket case. As of now, at least as far as available information indicates, it is only about $1 billion over budget and about nine months behind schedule, which means the first of the two units might actually be operational before 2024 ends (as originally planned) or in early 2025. The second unit is currently scheduled to come online in 2027, but that forecast should be taken with a grain of salt.

So, just to summarize the argument being made, the activation of the nuclear plant in Bangladesh will significantly reduce the cost of electricity in that country, so much so that the Philippines’s high electricity costs will be that much more unattractive to investors and they will move to Bangladesh. Let’s see how that assertion holds up to actual published data and math rather than dreams and feelings.

Not cheaper

First, a quick summary of current electricity prices in the Philippines. According to forwards market operator Green Tiger Markets, the round-the-clock (RTC) contract price for Luzon averaged P6,703 per megawatt-hour (MWh) in October, or about $120.79 at current exchange rates. For the first half of November (actually through November 19), electricity prices recorded by the Wholesale Electricity Spot Market (WESM) averaged P4,209/MWh ($75.85), although in reality, most electricity sold through the WESM, being supplemental or emergency supply, is sold at a much higher price.

The most recent reliable estimate of electricity prices in Bangladesh (from the Institute for Energy Economics and Fiscal Analysis, or IEEFA) is an average of TK8.84 per kilowatt-hour, or TK8,840/MWh, which works out to P4,465 or $80.47/MWh. As far as the impact of Rooppur NPP on electricity prices, the government estimated in 2019 that the plant, once fully operational, which will not happen until 2027 or 2028, could produce power at the equivalent of $56.75/MWh. If that estimate is accurate, that would lower the overall average price of electricity in Bangladesh to about $77.22/MWh — still higher than the current average price in the Philippines’ WESM.

Furthermore, the $56.75/MWh

estimate is almost certainly too optimistic. According to a University of Dhaka study in 2020, out of nine different model scenarios for the plant’s operation, the three most likely ones resulted in costs ranging from $63.15/ MWh to $82.50/MWh, which would raise the average price of electricity close to its current $80.47/MWh.

And as the idea of constructing what would almost amount to a new large-scale nuclear plant in the skeleton of the BNPP is a complete non-starter no matter how hard Rep. Cojuangco tries to convince the world otherwise, we can consider the available data from the recently canceled NuScale small modular reactor (SMR) project in Idaho, because SMR technology is the most likely direction for any nuclear program here, and NuScale’s project was the one that came closest to actually existing, so far. That plant had an initial estimated power cost of $58/MWh, which is attractive but does not include about $30/ MWh in US government subsidies. When the indicated cost ballooned to $89/MWh — in reality, about $119/MWh without the subsidies — the whole thing fell apart.

Not necessary

Bangladesh and the Philippines have a similarity in that in neither country is there a demonstrated supply need for nuclear power. One of the justifications for the Rooppur project is the widespread power shortages across the rural areas of the country, but this is not a supply issue but a connectivity problem. Without the Rooppur NPP, Bangladesh has an installed capacity of 25,227 MW but has a daily use of only 12,500 to 13,000 MW. The government spends billions every year on idle capacity because it is stuck with take-or-pay contracts for power and consequently has a difficult time finding funds to invest in grid expansion, which is what it actually needs.

Similarly, the Philippines also produces a surplus of electricity, and any local deficiencies are a function of incomplete connectivity rather than supply. According to Department of Energy (DoE) data, peak electricity demand in 2022 was 16,596 MW, from an installed capacity of 28,258 MW. Over the past five years, without even considering the BNPP or any other form of nuclear generation, capacity has grown at an average of 1,112 MW per year against an average peak demand growth of 561 MW per year — a comfortable supply margin of nearly 100 percent of demand. The BNPP’s now largely hypothetical nameplate capacity of 620 MW would only account for about 2.1 percent of overall peak demand and about 5.0 percent of Luzon’s, an addition that is not even necessary and hardly seems worth four or more years of effort and a price tag in excess of the $2 billion it cost to build the plant in the first place 40-plus years ago.