Energy infrastructure

tom1ie

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/119988762#Comment_119988762

Where abouts? The west coast? How far out?

Have you a link showing wind speeds by any chance?

Capt'n Midnight

Hydrogen pipeline between Spain and France to be ready 'by 2030'

The pipeline between Barcelona and Marseille—also known as the "BarMar" project—will carry two million tonnes of hydrogen per year, or 10 percent of expected European consumption, once it goes online, said Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez.

€2.5Bn with up to half of that coming from the EU.

The roadmap detailed three options for the route of the pipeline, with the preferred one stretching 455 kilometres (282 miles) at a maximum depth of almost 2,600 metres.

Construction would begin in 2025 and last four years and eight months, it said.

And another one (for LNG but prepared for Hydrogen)

Ukraine war revives France-Spain MidCat gas pipeline project The Midi-Catalonia (MidCat) pipeline would pump gas across the Pyrenees from Hostalric just north of Barcelona to Barbaira in southern France. ... Spain also wants the pipeline to be compatible with the transport of green hydrogen, in the hopes this will boost its appeal to Brussels which has made financing renewable energy projects a priority.

It would probably be more efficient than carrying LNG from Algeria to Germany by boat to route it through this pipe.

josip

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/119988762#Comment_119988762

Irish Sea 8.5kn, Celtic Sea 12kn, both in areas where offshore windfarms will be located before 2030.

http://www.marine.ie/site-area/data-services/real-time-observations/irish-weather-buoy-network-imos

Stephen_Maturin

How much of our wind energy capacity will be state owned come 2030 does anyone know?

Birdnuts

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/119989515#Comment_119989515

That remains 2b seen with this government still developer focused on energy policies while ignoring EU requirements for MPAs and protecting the most sensitive marine habitats covering at least 30% of Irish waters

Birdnuts

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/119989716#Comment_119989716

FA with zero royalties to the state too as Eamon Ryan et al hand over vast chunks of our seabed to private developers

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/119989813#Comment_119989813

Regarding MPA's, Public consultation closed in Mar

https://www.gov.ie/en/press-release/bf4fc-public-consultation-demonstrates-strong-support-for-expansion-of-marine-protected-areas/

Legislaton announced in August for MPA's by FF Minister Peter Burke

https://www.gov.ie/en/press-release/0bda2-approval-given-for-development-of-general-scheme-to-provide-for-marine-protected-areas/

tom1ie

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/119989818#Comment_119989818

If off shore really is the answer why does our government not have the confidence to build state owned assets that would own the generators? Is this due to EU competition law?

cnocbui

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/119990011#Comment_119990011

The cost of recent Uk offshore wind farms is quite high, compared to their low capacity factors..

MightyMunster

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/119988803#Comment_119988803

You can click on the buoys on the map and it shows the results below. Plenty windy off Waterford and Cork yesterday for wind generation

https://www.met.ie/forecasts/marine-inland-lakes/buoys

josip

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/119990076#Comment_119990076

Are you referring to Hywind in Scotland? That was floating offshore. My understanding is that the Irish Sea and Celtic Sea areas are shallower and the turbines there will be bottom fixed. There are no question marks about the economic viability of these types of windfarms.

Stephen_Maturin

So wait are we really not going to own any of these new offshore wind farms?

That’s a travesty if true - all this talk about becoming world leaders in the area when really we’re just farming it out to everyone else. I understand we likely lack the expertise currently but there’s only one way we can gain that

Bass Reeves

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/119989818#Comment_119989818

TBH if we tried to charge royalties the few that are willing to build would pull out aswell.

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/119990011#Comment_119990011

Do you want the people that are trying to build the children's hospital go and build windfarms out at sea

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/119990285#Comment_119990285

Sorry I do not want to learn the expensive way.

hans aus dtschl

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/119990285#Comment_119990285

Source/generation is generally not needed to be owned by the state.

Network infrastructure and its management is best always retained in the ownership of the state.

This applies to a lot of industries: Gas, Energy, Buses, Communications, etc.

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/119990011#Comment_119990011

Not sure about the competition law and whether it applies I'm afraid.

tom1ie

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/119990545#Comment_119990545

This is why we have electricity prices though no?

If the state actually generated electricity would it not mean cheaper electricity?

Ie if ESB owned the wind farms would electricity prices not be cheaper?

cnocbui

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/119990246#Comment_119990246

No I am not, East Anglia 1 and Dogger Bank are the two I usually base costs on. I think it's around €2.838 billion per GW of capacity for something that only generates at half that capacity. Floating offshore is in an entirely different league alltogether; probably the most expensive form of electricity production in existence after fusion. The Norwegians are currently building the latest floating offshore wind farm, Hywind Tampen. It's a bit cheaper than the original Hywind, but it's still head meltingly expensive.

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/119990285#Comment_119990285

The state owns damn all of the generation as it is, most is in private ownership

hans aus dtschl

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/119990739#Comment_119990739

It's a good point, but remember there's also the perceived "inefficiencies" of state-owned companies like this. People regularly complain about the quality of service from Bus Éireann, Eir, ESB etc, it's something of a trope/stereotype that state providers do a poor quality job.

Certainly from my own personal perspective I have had visibility of poor project management and execution by ESB (perhaps fairer to complain about their contractors in CapEx projects) and very poor site management by ESB in OpEx.

So I wouldn't be entirely confident that if ESB owned the wind farms, that energy prices would necessarily be cheaper. Rather the exchequer would potentially get a better return is all.

Just my opinion, and I appreciate that everyone won't feel the same way.

Charles Babbage

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/119988336#Comment_119988336

The previous record being the very cold spell in December 2010, it is notable that this lasted so long when the population of the island has increased in the order of 10% since then.

They have similar demand today, but should get more from wind than they did yesterday, they should get one quarter from wind in the peak period compared to under 10% yesterday, and so less need to import from Britain. All in all yesterday was close to as bad as it gets.

On the Grid dashboard it is noticeable that NI has a bigger evening peak than the ROI, being 20% higher at 17:15 than two hours earlier. Are there any active measures in place in the ROI to suppress the peak?

machiavellianme

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/119989515#Comment_119989515

8.5kn is 4.3m/s so turbines will have to be selected to ensure their cut in speed is below this. Though at that speed, it's going to be in the non rated (nonlinear) output region so who knows what this will actually mean on the grid? What is the cost per 1MWh in such conditions? Though you'd have to imagine its better than nothing, which is what we have now.

cnocbui

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/119990739#Comment_119990739

You are correct. Australian states had ownership of power generation and distribution until the mid 90's, and everything worked like a charm, until Neocon/Thatcherite BS about private enterprise being more efficient caused conservative political parties to screw over the people and reward their mates in business by selling off these state owned assets for a song.

The result was under investment in infrastructure, while electricity prices increasd by 170%. IMO, electricity generation and distribution are best done by the state and the nonsense of so-called competition shown the door.

tom1ie

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/119992361#Comment_119992361

The exact same thing happened here under the guise of EU competition law pushed by (if I’m remembering correctly) the PD’s.

bk

Eh, my own experience of state owned companies, namely Telecom Eireann and Bus Eireann were a complete shitshow (BE largely still is).

I get the impression that people who say things like above are relatively young and didn't live through what Ireland was like in the 80's with state run companies. It was dreadful and you'd find few people who actually lived through it who would want to go back to it.

Just a small example, it took two years for my parents to get their landline installed once they ordered it from Telecom Eireann. To be clear, they lived in the city, down the road from one of the largest phone exchanges in the country with half the cities phone wires passing them, so certainly not rural or anything like that, simplest job possible!

By comparison the privately owned Eir will install one with a few weeks. And Eir has 1/4th of the number of staff as Telecom Eireann and operate a mobile phone and broadband networks, in addition to the telephone network with those staff!

The difference in quality of service and innovation is night and day.

Don't get me wrong, I was totally against the way that TE was privatised, the network should have stayed state owned, but trust me no one would want to go back to the days of TE.

Also I have to laugh when people say that the Electricity network was better in the past! I don't know what it was like in the 80's in Dublin, but in Cork City, the electricity would go out so often, that my parents used to keep a cupboard full of candels and a gas camping stove and heater for when the electricity went out.

The grid seems far more stable today then it was in the 70's IME.

omicron

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/119991263#Comment_119991263

8.5knots is at 10m standard measurement height, speed should be higher at the height of a standard turbine which would also help.

The kinsale energy platform used to often record speeds higher than any of the buoys as it was at 50m above sea level as far as I remember.

MightyMunster

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/119992719#Comment_119992719

Similar experience of regular black outs in Limerick in the 80s, 90s and 00s. When my dad started working from home he had to buy a UPS for his desktop as the power dropped so often

hans aus dtschl

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/119992719#Comment_119992719

Other than the fact that I think you're being a little harsh on BE (currently, not the 80's), that is entirely what I had experienced also.

Bass Reeves

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/119992719#Comment_119992719

while some of wha you say is true in the early noughties we had just about the cheapest electricity prices in Europe after market liberlisation we have the most expensive. 40 years ago the Irish electricity was as stable as most other bcountries networks. The network itself is still in state ownership it is just the generation capacity that was liberlised. part of the reason we have infrastructure issues now is because private investment is walking away from commitments it gave on power generation

On Telecom Eireann it was created in the earlu '80's because prevous to that telecomunications was part of the public service. It actually had the provision of phone's down to 1-3 weeks by the time it was privitised in the early noughties, I am not sure privitation was a forward step. it took control of our telecommunication network into private hands where it was starved of investment for 15 years( along with poor investment for the 3-5 years pre sale) again durinf the '90 we had the most advanced telecomunication network in EU. at present we are in the process of paying 3 billion for rural broadband that would probably have been funded inhouse by a state body

hans aus dtschl

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/119994709#Comment_119994709

"In the 90's we had the most advanced telecommunication network in the EU". If you don't mind, by which metric do you mean?

That doesn't feel like my memory of the period, having had the good fortune of visiting many parts of the EU in the 90's myself. But maybe my anecdotal experience doesn't tally with the facts...

In terms of energy prices, I think it might have been done to death here, but I believe that the current high prices are not necessarily a reflection on private operators profiteering, but rather a reflection on the current regulatory environment and the transition towards renewables. Also bear in mind that we basically had no exchequer funding for a reasonably long period (2011-2016 were barren years for state investment in anything), do you feel that "state owned" energy generation plants would have seen investment during those years?

I say all this as someone who thinks that a lot of Irish privatisation has been done poorly and regulated poorly BTW: I don't think "state owned" is any worse, just that I feel it's no better either. Anything "state owned" is necessarily saddled with political interference. We certainly NEED to own and manage the distribution networks (hello Enron!), but we don't NEED to own the generation end-points, we just need to govern them.

bk

""In the 90's we had the most advanced telecommunication network in the EU". If you don't mind, by which metric do you mean?"

What he is talking about is because Irelands telephone network was so bad, we were one of the last countries in Europe to switch to fully digital phone switching network in the 90's and as a result used the newest equipment available at the time.

This isn't really anything to boast about, we were at least a decade behind most of the rest of Europe in making this change!

And even then, they were WAY behind bringing out Broadband, various xDSL technologies and are only now rolling out FTTH, again about a decade behind much of Europe.

BTW I do agree that the privatisation of TE was a big mistake, I was totally against the privatisation of the network and I ended up joining boards because of my involvement with IrelandOffLine trying to force Eircom into delivering broadband to Ireland.

In my experience, it doesn't really matter if private or sate owned, the issue is companies having a monopoly. The privately owned Eircom having a monopoly, was almost as bad as the state owned TE monopoly. Things really only started to improve here when NTL/UPC/VM started investing into their own cable broadband network, which caused Eircom to start losing customers and to start to compete properly.

Monopolies are bad for the consumer, doesn't matter if private or state owned IME.

Brining it back to Energy infrastructure, the lessons learned from the privatisation of Telecom Eireann, lead to a different approach being taken by the energy market. It is why they decided to break it up into three different parts, consumer facing, network and generation. Keeping the electricity network under state ownership, like should have happened with the phone network. Competition then occurs at the generation and consumer level.

BTW The ESB is still state owned and it has the majority of generation capacity in Ireland, including both traditional power plants and wind. So I don't get people saying Electricity would be cheaper if generation was state owned, when it largely is currently state owned here!

In reality, the high electricity costs are due to the high gas prices because of the war in Ukraine. Even if all our gas power plants were state owned, it isn't like we could buy the gas to power them for any cheaper, just because they were state owned! International commodity markets couldn't care less about who owns the companies who buy their product.

I think the conversation on state owned or not is somewhat misplaced, what is important is that we get away from fossil fuels and the reliance on international markets as quickly as possible. To me it doesn't matter if it is the state owned ESB or various private companies, as long as it gets done quickly.

Bass Reeves

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/119995846#Comment_119995846

You are incorrect we were the first or if not one of the first to switch to a fully digital platform