Energy infrastructure

Birdnuts

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/122455358#Comment_122455358

The energy credits come out of our taxes and are yet another subsidy for price gouging energy companies and the wind scam

Capt'n Midnight

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/122455450#Comment_122455450

Our new PSO will be €3.23 - excluding VAT - a month. €47.29 a year?. And it's not all that long ago that most of the PSO went to subsidise peat stations and CHP.

I'm getting a ballpark cost for Hinkley-C of €75.05 per UK annual household bill.

We'd reserve power upgrades and additional spinning reserve which the UK has in place.

Calcuations:

Hinkley-C was to add £10–£15 (2016) to each bill, with this increasing to £21–£24 (£9-£11 extra) if was later than 2025 and replaced by low carbon. Those costs from 23 Jun 2017 and it's now looking three times the delay so £27-33 extra which is more than the bill for the nuclear power plant itself.

So new total would be something like £37-£48 (2016) so up to £63.93 (June) = €75.05

Busman Paddy Lasty

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/122458843#Comment_122458843

Highest energy bills in the EU is not that easy to calculate, it is wrong. There's a graph showing Ireland at something mental like 48c/kWh, nobody paying that.

Been paying 30c this last year and going to get a better deal this week.

Busman Paddy Lasty

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/122458845#Comment_122458845

You said the customer is getting screwed. This is false. The €450 comes from someone else's taxes, not our taxes unless you make over 1 million a year.

I use 2,000 kWh per year or €600 plus standing charge. Take €450 of someone else's taxes off that and I spend less than €500 per year consumption and standing charge.

machiavellianme

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/122459019#Comment_122459019

Huh? If want to go down the route of calling things false - What do you mean you have to make €1 million p.a. to cover a €450 credit out of your own tax contributions?

Someone on €1 million will contribute many multiples of that €450 since their tax liability after personal credit is still €387,850. That's before they buy a single item that is VAT eligible. Heck anyone who pays a total of €1960 for goods at the top VAT rate over the year will cover the €450 credit. Anyone making over €21k per annum will pay at least €450 on income tax alone.

While it's unlikely that the full extent of someone's tax contributions go directly towards their own personal services (including energy credit), it's not impossible. But the same can be said of anything funded from the public purse. You didn't pay for the road directly to your house or the school where you were educated or the Garda who polices your area. All general taxation covers these things. So it's hardly unforgivable for Birdnuts to use the royal "we" is it? Or are you sticking to him/her needing to earn at least €1 million to cover it (and even then, it might be wasted on providing services for others rather than themselves)?

Busman Paddy Lasty

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/122459383#Comment_122459383

In short the vast majority of people are net beneficiaries of taxation and redistribution, as you wrote in your last paragraph.

So unless that poster is in the net contributor minority, they are getting a net benefit from others.

KrisW1001

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/122458843#Comment_122458843

Yes, energy independence. We are an island; our electricity grid extends no further than the shores of this island. In terms of drawing power from neighbouring generators, or exporting surplus power, we are limited by DC Interconnector capacity

Yes, our electricity cost are high, but I cannot see why you keep blaming wind energy for this fact. Our electricity costs were high when all we did was burn fossil fuels. The prices are due to reduced economies of scale and our inability to pool fallback strategies with our neighbours. This small scale makes our like-for-like generation costs higher than in neighbouring countries: it is often cheaper to import gas-sourced electricity from the UK than to generate it ourself. (The UK, in turn, sees the same phenomenon with respect to the continental grid).

You can keep framing this basic truth as the government attacking your liberties, but it's a fundamental cost of living in a relatively small and isolated electricity market. More interconnectivity will help, but without electricity to sell at peak times, interconnectors won't get our prices down. Every country in Europe with "cheap" electricity has a positive balance of trade in energy (i.e., they export more than they consume domestically); we have a negative balance. That's why we are investing so heavily in renewables: we will eventually become an exporter of electricity, and it is that shift in trade that will lower our prices.

But even if it is lower, the PSO levy will still be around, because we will still be an island nation.

machiavellianme

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/122459440#Comment_122459440

Our electricity grid extends beyond the shores of this island to several of our offshore islands. It also connects to Great Britain via HVDC connections at Woodland in Meath and Ballycronan More in Antrim. It doesn't matter if it's a DC or AC connection, it's still capable of transferring power. Most of our wind turbines and all of our solar arrays have some element of DC in their connection.

What makes you think that we will eventually become a net exporter? That doesn't even hold true today during high wind. We regularly see imports during high wind. Power flows from low cost areas to high price areas through the fundamentals of market mechanics. As you pointed out, our costs are higher because we are an island and we have no indigenous low cost generation. All of our wind/solar installations are manufactured elsewhere and cost more to get here and install. Our wind costs more to produce than in GB or the continent. Why would we be exporting higher cost generation (that's before you even factor in the cost of losses on the interconnectors)?

If you really want energy independence, go back to burning peat because relying on intermittent wind or sunshine doesn't constitute independence and we're burning through Corrib with no available alternatives in sight.

gossamerfabric

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/122431798#Comment_122431798

encryption at any point between source and destination is taking up a lot more CPU cycles especially as key lengths increase.

What used to be a trivial consumer of CPU processing power has become quite large. I have had to look at some of our hosts and figure out why they are so much bigger than they used to be a couple of years ago.

Capt'n Midnight

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/122459510#Comment_122459510

Note : Combined Ramp Rate of EWIC and Moyle Interconnectors is limited to 10 MW/Min. Because it's DC.

Between 2010 and 2021, electricity imports to the UK increased almost ten-fold to 28.7 TWh , So anytime the UK isn't already maxed out on renewables for the foreseeable future they'll be importing (The decision on Sizewell-C will be delayed to next year, and even if it goes ahead it's only replacing plants are closing down. DRAX biomass with carbon storage is insanely expensive.)

And the UK can import and export at the same time. It just depends on supply/demand across the countries they are connected to , which depends on supply/demand of those countries too etc.

Example: Norway

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/122438784#Comment_122438784

Daylight hours for UTC time = Saturday, 3 August 2024, 20:02:00. So in summer we could export solar on sunny evenings.

KrisW1001

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/122459510#Comment_122459510

You've a couple of misconceptions there. The first is about grids, the second about when market pricing becomes a factor.

The defintion of an electricity grid is an area that is synchronised to the same AC frequency. lnterconnectors have that name because they connect between grids. Our grid extends no further than this island (and yes, if you are pedantic, the few thousands of connections on our offshore islands).

This is important because there is a huge cost difference between building DC interconnects and simply connecting synchronous AC sources to loads. The latter, however it's not an option because we're an island. As is GB, and that is why they, like us, are not part of the European grid. This is why the electricity grids in Ireland and the UK are divided on geographical, not national, lines. AC in Belfast is synchronous with Bantry, not Ayr.

You've answered your own question on the second part. We still import at times of wind because our demand for power is higher than we can supply locally at those times. At times like this, all of our wind is being used right here, so our choice to make up the shortfall is to either fire up gas "peaking" generators in Ireland or buy in electricity from GB. That's where the market pricing comes in. Because of economies of scale and access to fuel, the GB grid can almost always send us gas-sourced electricity cheaper than we can make it ourself.

Storms aside, we never curtail wind generation in favour of buying in electricity from abroad. We normally use all the wind we can produce. Only in periods of strong wind and low domestic demand do we export wind energy.

To get out of the net-importer situation that keeps our prices high, we need to add generation to our grid. For the scale of extra generation we need, our options are basically to use fossil fuels, nuclear, or wind/solar. Fossil fuels put us in the pocket of unstable regimes (with the sole and honourable exception of Norway), and, as noted above, fossil generation here is not cost-competitive: our small economies of scale and remoteness would make it more economical for us to build a gas plant within the GB grid and import from that, rather than build the same plant here (that's a crazy idea for other reasons, though). Nuclear has the same pricing problem, plus all the other public opposition and cost uncertainty that surrounds nuclear power.

Basically, wind and solar are the only options for which we don't incur a fuel import penalty…it doesn't matter that we have to buy in the gear - that's true of every kind of generation we could choose. What matters is that once we have that equipment built, generation has no further input costs. Wind is also the only type of generation where our remoteness gives us an enormous resource: we get to harvest the wind energy produced by the North Atlantic ocean. Wind isn't steady-state, though, so building to meet our own requirements means an overspec system that will often result in large surpluses, and it's by selling those surpluses (either directly, or following energy storage) that we will become a net exporter: our surplus wind power will be cheaper per megawatt than neighbouring nations' fossil power.

If you look at the countries that are large exporters of electricity, it is mostly renewable energy that they export, not nuclear or fossil power.

murphaph

And we have a very modern gas transmission network where most of the pipes can handle hydrogen instead of natural gas. We've got end of life and life expired gas fields to store vast quantities of hydrogen produced by wind energy. This all translates to a clear path to total energy independence and becoming a very significant energy exporter and in doing so makes us a lot more important to the EU.

What's made this all viable is that Europe is going to need green hydrogen to meet its targets and we will be able to produce it as cheaply or more cheaply than anyone else, even factoring in the cost of bulk shipping.

Markcheese

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/122460069#Comment_122460069

I'm assuming the pumping and gas compression appliances would all have to be changed out , hydrogen needs to be at far higher pressures than nat gas , to have the same energy for a given volume,

How wise is it to try put hydrogen in an old natural gas well ,

You'd have to compress the hydrogen to get it out to the well and inject it .. and it'd need to be compressed again as it exits the well , if it could be relied upon to be available, it's going to seep through rock , and depending on the rock type ,how much natural cracking there is and the extent of fracking that's been carried out .. there may not be an available reservoir,

To start with , renewable energy isnt cheap in Ireland,

Large scale Hydrogen electrolysis is in its infancy , and compressing the hydrogen has a significant energy cost, the storage , recompression,transmission is then another significant cost .

Leakage because of storing already expensive hydrogen in an underground nat gas Well ,it's a bit bonkers

KrisW1001

The economics of hydrogen as an energy medium depends on having a large surplus of electricity that you cannot sell or otherwise use.

Negative pricing occurs quite regularly in renewable networks, and that makes even something as energy inefficient as H2 electrolysis, storage and combustion into a commercially viable operation.

Personally, I don't think we'll ever be shipping Hydrogen anywhere: once an efficient means of sythesising Methanol (CH3OH) from hydrogen and carbon dioxide is perfected, then methanol, not hydrogen, could be the main replacement for oil and gas in transportation. It's so much easier to transport.

machiavellianme

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/122459684#Comment_122459684

I think you have a misconception about grids. Making up a definition doesn't make you right. For example, the national grid in Japan has two different AC frequencies, interconnected using HVDC. Do you want to go tell them they in fact don't have a grid because you made up some new definition?

We have an AC synchronous area on the island of Ireland (as per the LFCBOA). We are connected to another AC synchronous area via HVDC, those connections individually constitute tailed connections but together make the Irish and GB systems meshed grids. For example, if a significant fault happens in Continental Europe, the GB system will respond and it's frequency will dip based on the setpoints of the Channel interconnectors. After the frequency reaches 49.8Hz there, our interconnectors will also respond and the Irish frequency will also reduce. The only difference if it was AC is that the response would be instantaneous through the electromagnetic coupling (inertia etc) whereas the HVDC controllers allow for setpoints to be reached before there's a response.

There have been several instances where a fault in Europe has impacted on the Irish power system. The most recent being a fault on the IFA interconnector between GB and France. If the all-island synchronous area isn't part of the grid, how did this happen?

Heck, even Wiki describes it better than you. The first line alone says that "An electrical grid (or electricity network) is an interconnected network for electricity delivery from producers to consumers.".

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electrical_grid

I won't even comment on your ignorance of the market. We regularly see imports during high wind and, get this, we actually curtail or spill indigenous wind generation to do so. It is nothing to do with not having sufficient generation on the island but everything to do with market rules and simple economics.

If you take your own advice and look at the net exporters of electricity, instead of fabricating lies, you'll see that the 3 largest net exporters are France, Sweden and Norway. France is dominated by nuclear and the Scandinavian countries have immense hydro reserves (conventional plant, not asynchronous intermittent rubbish like wind) along with some nuclear. See

https://www.powerengineeringint.com/world-regions/europe/france-tops-europes-net-power-export-chart/