Energy infrastructure

gjim

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/118569467#Comment_118569467

"I make it an average of 115 Kw per hour over a year if it's really 540 MW capacity"

Hmm.. that would represent a capacity factor of about 0.02%? You're wrong by a factor of at least 500.

By the way, there's no such thing as a "Kw per hour". Even using such an expression suggests you don't really understand electrical units at all.

Birdnuts

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/118569683#Comment_118569683

Power demand fell during Covid - plus advances in Tech have dramitically reduced power use in many industrial and domestic situations. The fact that Germany is desperate for Russian Gas says alot about the current state of the German grid

Birdnuts

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/118568882#Comment_118568882

The fact that they keep pushing out the timeslines on this says alot!!

Birdnuts

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/118570367#Comment_118570367

Sterilizing these places under solar farms or windfarms will destroy any potential they have for Biodiversity, flood control, water quality improvement and all the other functions these areas provide or have the potential to provide again. Your figures for Carbon savings are also way out and don't take account of the steady decline in panel output over time etc., the giant windfarms they are building in North Mayo involves hauling vast amounts of concrete from the likes of Castlebar via HGV journeys of up to 100KM. Bellacorick currently looks like an slow evolving environmental disaster site off the back of all this with flooding and silt contamination issues ongoing along the important game fishery river(Owenhinny).

https://www.irishtimes.com/news/environment/mayo-wind-farm-project-takes-on-shades-of-corrib-controversy-1.3702143

"The road has since subsided in part, a pillar cap has been knocked off a century-old bridge and the Mullarkeys and neighbours have photographs of frequent flooding incidents from the Oweninny river and tributaries. Deer disturbed by the night lights on the wind-farm site are roaming into local farms.

The small number of residents have recently taken to protests, and are very upset that gardaí were called."

I visited some folk up there only last week and the situation is as bad if not worse

Capt'n Midnight

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/118573849#Comment_118573849

Yes Gerrmany retired 3 nuclear power stations at the start of the year.

But the UK retired one last month and another was another retired early instead of coming back on line in December.

France has 4 stations down for repairs.

UK closed down their gas storage in 2017.

And Russians reducing gas through Ukraine.

And LPG being in demand in Asia.

But let's blame Germany.

Birdnuts

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/118573880#Comment_118573880

Germany keen to power ahead with Nordstream 2 says alot!!

On the point made about natural gas containing hydrogen, it does, but in tiny trace amounts. It's almost entirely methane and a bit of ethane. Hydrogen is normally only a trace in the gas. You'd have as much oxygen in it!

You can add hydrogen to it, but it is not present naturally. In fact, the kinsale head gas fields tended produce exceptionally pure methane, with very few other components and almost no hydrocarbon content. A lot of other gas has to go through far more extensive scrubbing.

I think you must be confusing it with "town gas" which contained a lot of hydrogen.

Ireland has some advantages, mostly that our natural gas infrastructure is very young as we has no natural gas until the late 1970s and a lot of the grid is much younger than that. A lot of continental EU, British and American gas infrastructure is much older. Hydrogen is a lot harder on pipework and exposure to atomic hydrogen accelerate embrittlement of metal pipes, especially older ones. There are also some challenges with ensuring it says in - as it’s a tiny molecule.

If you get beyond about 10% blend you’re looking at having to change burners on every gas appliance in use and if you get above about 40% you begin to need different type of compressors on the network side.

It’s doable and we have the relatively young network, but it’s still not just a matter of swapping CH4 for H2.

It could potentially simplify a lot of the adaptations to homes and lifestyle though as by and large, it would mean we could continue to heat with gas and radiators. You could also potentially take a lot of load off the electrical grid by not requiring as many heat pumps and using more compressed gas vehicles. You could even use hydrogen burning CHP (combined heat and power) systems in commercial buildings - generating green electricity locally and capturing waste heat. (Already done with natural gas.)

Biogas can also be blended into the network as it is CH4 - we could capture a lot more of that by processing pig manure in treatment plants for example, rather than just lashing it onto fields as slurry - this killing two birds with one stone. You’d still have fertiliser, but in a far less smelly and more controlled way, potentially dealing with a lot of the nitrate and nuance issues.

Natural Gas - Typical chemical composition:

Methane 94.7%

Ethane 4.2%

Propane 0.2%

Butane 0.02%

Isobutane 0.02%

Pentane 0.01%

Isopentane 0.01%

Hexane + 0.01%

Nitrogen 0.5%

Carbon dioxide 0.3%

Oxygen 0.01%

Hydrogen 0.02%

Town Gas / Coal Gas (as was used in Irish cities before natural gas)

Carbon Dioxide 16.3% - 19.9%

Carbon Monoxide1.0% – 3.1%

Methane28.2% – 30.7%

Hydrogen 46.3% – 51.8%

Nitrogen and Oxygen 0% – 3.3%

cnocbui

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/118573253#Comment_118573253

You are correct, I erred, it should have been 116 Mwh, which nonetheless, is awful for a land area 1.5 times that of Phoenix Park.

My other figure of 21.6% of actual power generation vs rated capacity per hour, assuming 24 hours in a day, was correct.

tom1ie

So would the end goal here be to have 150%+ of the grid needs catered for by wind.

When wind is generating the excess is either sold on the interconnectors and the rest turned into green hydrogen.

The green hydrogen is used in the gas network and for HGVs, container ships etc.

A certain amount of the green hydrogen is also stored for when wind stops blowing so that the GH can be used to make electricity, the same was gas is used in CCGT stations?

Is this the idea we are striving for?

timmyntc

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/118574633#Comment_118574633

Wind has an average capacity factor of ~35%, so we'd probably need close to 300% of the annual demand catered by wind based on max rated capacity, if we are to produce enough wind to cover peak & store as hydrogen for times when wind is not enough.

gjim

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/118574365#Comment_118574365

You're still mixing up your units - MWh measures energy, MW measures power (energy per unit time).

And you've overshot this time - an average 116MW for a 540MW generator would represent a capacity factor of 21%. Such capacity factors are easily achievable with solar a bit closer to the equator but in northern Europe the capacity factor for the existing installed solar PV is around 12%. New installations do better of course but I'd only expect a few percentage points improvement as the average age of the plant decreases significantly over the next few years.

But capacity factor is irrelevant for this discussion - it's just a tool to allow quick/easy comparison of actual energy delivered between different type of generation with different characteristics. E.g. glancing at a table of capacity factors - coal might typically have a capacity factor of 40%, while solar PV is 25%, I can quickly state that 1GW of coal capacity will generate the same amount of electrical energy as 1.6GW of solar over the course of a year.

It tells you almost nothing about the economics or financial consideration for a given generation technology. A 1GW plant with a capacity factor of 15% is still better value and generates energy much cheaper than than a 1GW plant with an 80% capacity factor that costs 10 times as much to build and operate. That's why people use LCOE (or LACE) as it takes the capacity factor into account and gives a standard way of comparing the cost of energy generated by different means regardless of the nameplate peak power.

That's why northern European countries a piling into solar - solar PV panels are now so cheap that they still beat all other sources of electricity on price even if locating them quite a bit north of the equator reduces their efficiency considerably. A MWh generated by new-build nuclear (for example) costs about 6 times as much as that generated by solar. Even operating solar PV at half efficiency isn't enough for nuclear to come close in terms of price.

bk

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/118574723#Comment_118574723

Offshore wind tends to be over 50% and with the best yet being 57%. Which BTW is better then Natural Gas plants.

Yes tom1ie, that is the general plan. Though we could also import over the interconnectors when the wind isn't blowing (e.g. French Nuclear). Also we are likely to see other storage technologies used too.

Another option would be to continue to use Natural Gas in power plants combined with Carbon Capture and Storage. Though I have my doubts about CCS and would prefer if we didn't continue to use gas, even with CCS.

Oh, and also you can produce Ammonia from Hydrogen.

Capt'n Midnight

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/118574365#Comment_118574365

Supporters of nuclear like to use annual capacity factor as a metric because it disguises the delays, unpredictable outages and early retirements. It gives the false impression you can rely on them 24/7 whereas in reality they need lots of spinning reserve.

Solar not being there 24/7 is more than offset by the low, low cost. Solar cells cost under 30c/watt today. And they are available in bulk.

The bait and switch price being touted for Small Modular Reactors is £32 Bn for 7GW. In 20 years time. They don't exist. RR have made dozens of reactors for the navy so they are charging a lot of money to re-invent the wheel. Also the nuclear culture in the RN is a wee bit optimistic. All 7 of the UK's nuclear attack subs were stood down a while back, no full explanation but it wasn't staffing levels.

And solar keeps getting cheaper. Larger wafers means less parts to assemble, and larger modules with fewer connections.

timmyntc

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/118574797#Comment_118574797

There is more to energy than the price per watt, especially with solar as it takes up massive amounts of area for a very low return.

But sure who cares about land use? Who cares about nature, or destroying massive amounts of habitats? The chape solar panels will save us (just dont think about the nighttime)

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/118574796#Comment_118574796

Which offshore wind projects have gotten 57% capacity?

The UK offshore wind farms have lifetime capacity measured here https://energynumbers.info/uk-offshore-wind-capacity-factors

The best is 53%, worst is ~30%. Average is in the 30s. A lot of those offshore farms are off Scottish coast which has similar wind speeds to those off the Irish west and North coasts.

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/118574633#Comment_118574633

I've made the point over and over that batteries in new builds can already be done at a fairly reasonable price. For someone like me who uses 5-10kWh per day, €5k of batteries (high-balling it to show just how doable it is) would leave me with 5 days of high demand sitting in the house. Bigger houses can have bigger batteries to suit them. In a doomsday scenario where the wind doesn't blow in the Atlantic, over land or over the Irish Sea (gotta get going with off-shore) for a week there'll still be some generation which can top up people who need it. Some smart management and almost trickle-like charging overnight from the grid to add a couple of kWh to each household would stave off any issues.

This **** is doable and aside from the time needed to build the wind turbines everything is pretty much ready. We have the government encouraging €10k+ heat pumps and retrofitting places with 10s of thousands to insulate them. Stick a wall battery in all new builds and encourage storage (with proper smart tariffs) in other houses and we'd be well on the way.

It will take work. Having smart metering so that if the forecast is windy then the battery doesn't charge unnecessarily etc., without most people needing or wanting to manually check or change the charging patterns will be necessary. Open and transparent pricing will also be key. But short of literally a full week of literally 0 wind across 200,000 square kilometres it can be done, the technology exists. Every house in Ireland could have 50+kWH of storage for less than the price of Hinkley Point C.

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/118574900#Comment_118574900

In terms of a longer lasting bang for the buck, I think insulation wins over batteries. Especially when you consider how much retrofitting needs to be done to the national housing stock.

That's not to say battery systems are a bad idea, they're not, I regularly drool over some of the setups I see on the Renewable energy forum. Those folks have some class gear.

Capt'n Midnight

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/118574723#Comment_118574723

We are getting one third of our energy from wind already. So we'd only need to add twice what we have already. Which would cost less than €10Bn.

Having three times the wind energy would mean full grid power even on relatively calm days. So we'd get close to 80% target for 2030 if we rolled out the Silvermines pumped storage and that one down in Cork and other ready to go projects like insulation and smart metering.

But the more wind and solar we have the less time we have to rely on storage.

Note : energy to hydrogen and back is only 40% efficient. 70-80% on the electrolysis and up to 60% for CCGT or fuel cells. We already have electrical connections to the turbines in existing power stations and we already have pipelines between the power stations and the gas fields. (OK there's a bit more to it) But it would allow the storage of 10% of annual demand and you could get 3GW of solar from putting panels on existing farm buildings.

bk

"Which offshore wind projects have gotten 57% capacity?"

Hywind Scotland in 2020:

https://www.equinor.com/en/news/20210323-hywind-scotland-uk-best-performing-offshore-wind-farm.html

BTW Hydro power has a capacity factor of about 40%, doesn't stop the Norwegains using it in vast quanties.

As long as it is cheap enough, it isn't that important. I mean would you prefere to have a technology that has a 100% capacity factor, but ends up costing €1,000 per KWh or one that has 25% capacity factor, but costs 2 cent per KW/h?

Just like how petrol and Diesel engines are only roughly 30% efficient, never stopped anyone from buying an ICE car, because the fuel was still cheap enough.

Sam Russell

As I have said several times before, efficiency is measured in the wallet. Cheap is good for the same result.

If every suitable roof was covered with PV panels, and most homes equipped with battery storage and smart meters, it would work.

Add in sufficient insulation to bring homes to a minimum BER of B, then the use of electricity for heating would, more or less, be eliminated.

The promise in the 1950s was that nuclear generation would be so cheap that it would not be metered. That never happened - not even slightly cheaper electricity.

bob mcbob

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/118573908#Comment_118573908

A trial is due to start at the end of this year to test the viability of using green hydrogen to replace natural gas in households.

Some 300 homes in Fife will be fitted with free hydrogen boilers, heaters and cooking appliances to be used for more than four years in the largest test of whether zero carbon hydrogen, made using renewable energy and water, could help meet Britain’s climate goals.

Ofgem’s £56m funding pot will also support a £12.7m project from National Grid to carry out “offline” hydrogen trials, using old gas grid pipes, to test the safety of transporting hydrogen gas across the country.

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2020/nov/30/scottish-green-hydrogen-fife

timmyntc

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/118575012#Comment_118575012

57% for a single year as opposed to the current lifetime efficiency which is I quoted

The environmental issues with hydro aside, it can provide valuable storage & reservoirs for drinking water supplies. Solar farms provide nothing but occupy vast swaths of land. Solar could be near free for panels, so long as its very inefficient capacity per area, its not a good option for this country.

Put it on buildings and houses as a means of reducing domestic demand (localised supplies can reduce grid demand), but the idea that solar farms in Ireland will make any kind of meaningful grid contribution is nonsense. It's only been done for the overly generous subsidies from govt, its neither good for the grid or good for the environment. (But it will make some lucky investors very rich!)

On the ICE analogy, consider if ICE engines had to be so big that only lorries were feasible to drive - do you think we would encourage every household to own and drive a lorry cab to do the school run, nip to the shops? It's an area issue, the fact that solar effective capacity is so low exacerbates the area requirements for solar farms.

timmyntc

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/118575070#Comment_118575070

If cheap was all we cared about, we wouldnt have carbon taxes and would still be using fossil fuels.

Clearly there is more to the equation than cheap, otherwise we would buy cheap solar panels and cover 1/10 of the land in the country in panels, because theyre cheap. Just as there are environmental concerns re: co2 emissions, the same applies to habitat destruction from inefficient solar "farms".

bob mcbob

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/118574633#Comment_118574633

To get to net zero you probably need close to 150% of all energy used catered for by renewables.

Scotland is close to 100% of grid needs now. The next target is 50% of all energy needs produced by renewables. This graph shows how big a target this is.

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/118575085#Comment_118575085

Solar farms provide nothing but occupy vast swaths of land

Solar farms provide power.

Solar can be mounted on roofs, placed on lake/reservoir surfaces, or on land.

In the case of land, as is the case with the recent BnM announcement, it's going to be put on 1,000 acres of exhausted bog land i.e. Bog which basically doesn't exist anymore otherwise BnM would be doing restoration / rewetting, which, incidentally, I would support ahead of any solar installation.

Sam Russell

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/118575121#Comment_118575121

What I said was 'Cheap is good for the same result.' I did not say 'If cheap was all we cared about, we wouldnt have carbon taxes and would still be using fossil fuels.'

Please do not misquote or twist what I actually said.

bk

"57% for a single year as opposed to the current lifetime efficiency which is I quoted"

Fair enough, but when we start building similar floating offshore off the West coast, we are likely to see the same or better. Worth keeping in mind.

But as I pointed out, even if you are looking at only 35% of onshore, it isn't a big deal given how relatively cheap it is. Like why have we mostly built onshore wind until now, when it has a worse capacity factor then offshore? Because it is also cheaper then offshore, you just build a little bit more to make up the difference.

"The environmental issues with hydro aside, it can provide valuable storage & reservoirs for drinking water supplies."

Well Norway certainly isn't lacking in drinking water! They have built vast hydro facilities to overproduce cheap electricity and sell it to their neighbours over interconnectors. The same we can do by overbuilding wind.

"Solar farms provide nothing but occupy vast swaths of land. Solar could be near free for panels, so long as its very inefficient capacity per area, its not a good option for this country"

My understanding is that these aren't being built on active bogs, but on areas that have already been fully drained and stripped of their peat. Basically these bogs have already been destroyed. Putting panels on them seems like a good way to rehabilitate them. I suspect we will see faunan and flora pop up underneath and between the panels and they will become a thriving ecosystem for animals.

"On the ICE analogy, consider if ICE engines had to be so big that only lorries were feasible to drive - do you think we would encourage every household to own and drive a lorry cab to do the school run, nip to the shops?"

Err... clearly you haven't spent much time in Texas! Big stupid trucks as far as the eye can see. I'm pretty certain if the above was the case, we would all be driving big trucks unfortunately.

The challenge with hydrogen as a direct v

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/118575078#Comment_118575078

That’ll be interesting. The issue is though you can only blend so much before you’ll have to start converting areas. It would be like the time they switched from “old gas” to “new gas” in the cities in the 1980s, albeit hopefully without having to replace all the pipe work this time.

The entire has distribution network was rebuilt for natural gas. The old systems in Dublin, Cork etc leaked when used with it , mostly because the old town gas supplies contained an element of vaporised hydrocarbons that left a slightly waxy surface on the pipes which kept joints sealed.

Most of our gas distribution network is plastic, but you might have to remove some of the metal pieces and there are plenty of those especially in above ground pipes in homes.

I could see it being installed exclusively for heating, probably with an external boiler - similar to those oil heat pack units, only maybe more compact.

Hydrogen is highly explosive and has a lower ignition temperature than either natural gas or petrol, but it dissipates very rapidly in air because of its molecular weight being so tiny. It’s also completely non toxic. The ideal solution would be to keep the appliance outside.

The other issue is it could be very problematic to develop hydrogen cooking. You’d render any appliance burning open gas flames obsolete. It’s likely to be too explosive to use in an uncontrolled burn like that. The flame is also extremely light coloured or completely invisible which isn’t very good for that use as you’d have very significant injury risks if it say lapped up around a pot and you couldn’t see it. Gas fires would also become obsolete. Optical flame detectors also don’t work reliably with hydrogen, so you’d have to use different boiler designs.

You’d be looking at hydrogen for heat, maybe fuel cell boilers and almost certainly CHP in larger commercial contexts, but it’s not going to be like for like replacement for natural gas.

The tests so far have managed to get a 20% blend btw, but that’s as far as you can go. It’s still a potentially big saving though, especially if you maybe had about 10% - 20% captured biogas, you could cut your carbon emissions by about 40%.

The costs of production still need to drop a long way too, but that’s more about technological maturity and scale.

timmyntc

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/118575159#Comment_118575159

As I have said several times before, efficiency is measured in the wallet. Cheap is good for the same result.

Efficiency is not just measured in the wallet - it can be tangibly measured by energy output per m2. Solar is a big waste of space, particularly so given its poor output at our latitude and annual cloud cover. It being cheap does not mean its efficient.

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/118575148#Comment_118575148

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/118575398#Comment_118575398

If that solar farm is on land with no possible other use (rewetting/other agri) then thats fine, but proposed solar farms are not and will not exclusively be on exhausted bog land.

We already have large solar farms in Kinsale, one underway in Meath, and several more due to start construction this year or next. To my knowledge none of those are planned to be sited on exhausted bog land.

And as for what happens in Texas, well while the Texans may have no problem with it - we recognise that is a definite issue. Veering slightly off-topic but cars/trucks for individual transportation is a big waste of space, which is why we invented mass-transit in urban areas. Solar PV farms will eventually run into a similar problem, that the effective power capacity you get from huge solar farms is not worth the loss of land-use from installing them. There are better denser ways to generate electricity.

In any line of business in the world, its seen as wasteful and inefficient to have an asset thats only used 50% or less of the time - yet somehow we entertain the installation of vast swathes of solar PV panels on greenfield sites for a theoretical best use case of what - 50% of the time? and A real world efficiency of ~10%

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/118575467#Comment_118575467

Not sure what the issue is to be honest. If a farmer or a company owns land are they not allowed to put solar on it because.... what exactly?

Is it ok to put a pig farm but not a solar farm?

What about a solar farm versus a stika plantation?

Trying to understand what the issue is with solar using land. Everything uses land to some extent but to say "X uses more land than Y therefore X is bad" just seems illogical.

Maybe there is something I'm missing in your objection to solar?

Granted I'll concede that agri land should be kept for agri usage but at the end of the day if the owner decides and gets permission for solar then its also a valid use

cnocbui

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/118574797#Comment_118574797

The usual renewables low cost nonsense that doesn't include the cost of storage and infrastructure to match the 24/7 output of a nuclear plant.

"Solar PV and wind have become increasingly competitive with conventional technologies with similar generation profiles; without storage, however, these resources lack the dispatch characteristics, and associated benefits, of such conventional technologies"

https://www.lazard.com/perspective/levelized-cost-of-energy-levelized-cost-of-storage-and-levelized-cost-of-hydrogen/

"The technologies postulated to even out renewables’ intermittency are currently very expensive. Renewable energy supplemented by long-term battery storage, for example, is more expensive than renewable energy backed up by nuclear. A November 2018 Massachusetts Institute of Technology study compared the costs of a range of combinations of energy technologies to meet a requirement of zero-carbon emissions. The lowest-cost combination, using conservative cost projections, was not renewables plus storage but renewables and nuclear, with about half the energy coming from nuclear." https://www.powermag.com/we-need-nuclear-energy-as-part-of-the-energy-transition/

The cost of grid scale batteries to get renewables to match the reliable delivery profile of nuclear is considerably higher than the cost of nuclear. That leaves hydrogen, which is not costed at grid scales yet, and as I and others have to keep pointing out to you, existing NG infrastructure is not a solution because it can't handle pure hydrogen. There are facilities purpose built for handling and storing hydrogen, but they were purpose built, not adapted from NG infrastructure.

Natural gas has no place in this discussion as a renewables backup because it's not zero CO2, while nuclear is.

Your constant anti-nuclear stance and insistence it's too expensive - blah, blah - is beyond weird, because nuclear power stations are being built as we speak. The engineers and economists and financiers involved in those massive national projects are all wrong, but you have out thought the lot of them and are right?

The UN, the IPCC and the IEA, all acknowledge that significantly increasing the amount of power generated via nuclear is a vital and critical cornerstone of any effort to tackle anthropogenic CO2. All of them are wrong?