Energy infrastructure

cnocbui

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

You have changed your tune - ahem:

"2021 was a decent enough year for bog rewetting/restoration projects.

At least 7.5m tonnes of carbon captured by peatlands rehabilitated in 2021

https://www.irishtimes.com/news/environment/at-least-7-5m-tonnes-of-carbon-captured-by-peatlands-rehabilitated-in-2021-1.4791340

Bord na Móna confirms another 5,200 hectares of peatlands have been restored

Hopefully the number keeps growing year-on-year for the next few years"

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/118572960/#Comment_118572960

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/118575670#Comment_118575670

There are no plans for nuclear to be built in Ireland as current legislation prevents it from being built here and there are no indication that will ever change so the pros and cons make little difference to Ireland.

No point going over the cons again, they've been done to death across many threads including the one on this forum specifically for nuclear.

cnocbui

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

That's a cost of €72,000 per home in the trial.

Capt'n Midnight

We've already moved from hydrogen rich town gas to natural gas. So totally doable.

You could have 3GW of solar installed on existing farm buildings which means most of the grid connections are already in place even if it means upgrading cables.

Back of envelope says 300Km2 would power the country. (500kW/hectare * 21% capacity factor for 31TWh ) That's 3/4 of a Lough Neagh of floating panels. Or a fraction of the unused bogs owned by Board Na Móna. Poulaphouca covers 22Km2 so up to 1.1GW compared to 30MW from hydro.

In the future most homes will have solar built in because it's so cheap. Stuff like roof tiles with integrated panels or glass that harvests UV/IR but lets visible light through.

timmyntc

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/118575994#Comment_118575994

Source on the 21% capacity factor?

SEAI seem to suggest its 10%

https://www.seai.ie/technologies/solar-energy/electricity-from-solar/#:~:text=A%20big%20share%20of%20your%20annual%20electricity%20needs&text=m%20of%20silicon%20solar%20panels,kWh%20of%20electricity%20a%20year.

A home solar PV system sized at 20 sq. m (~3kW) and well located would generate around 2,600kWh of electricity a year. That is over 40% of the average annual electricity demand of an Irish home.

Birdnuts

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/118574781#Comment_118574781

They are piling into solar thanx to subsidised prices - UK took away the latter a few years ago and the industry nearly collapsed, the same happened in Spain which says alot given their solar resources!!

Birdnuts

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

In the era of wind/solar energy bills have never been higher!! - its all over the media 2day with irate folks calling into radio stations up and down the country!! The countries who have gone down that route all have significantly higher energy costs then the likes of France and the Czech Rep with nuke grids

Birdnuts

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

BNM say alot of things on this matter but the reality of their actions on the ground is very different. Just look at the Derryadd(Longford) and Ballydermot(Kildare) cases where they are targetting industrial windfarms on biodiverse, rewetted peatlands despite leading peatlands ecologists like Catherine Renu Wilson of TCD calling them out on it!!

bk

"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."

Bord Na Mona have surveyed all their land and the land suitable for rewetting (some 8,000 Hectares) is being rewetted and land suitable from rehabilitation is being rehabilitated (some 80,000 Hectares). Only the land in the worst condition is being used for Solar by BnM.

I don't think people understand how truly damaged this land is. This land has been completely drained and all the peat layers removed. Often most nutrients have been stripped from the remaining soil. It is better to think of this land more like a strip mine then farming land.

For rehabilitation they are often converted to low quality grazing land. But there is some good news here, even with solar panels in place, this land can usually still be used for grazing. Grass grows just fine under solar panels and in lots of Solar farms they then leave sheep use the land, they help keep the grass and growth from getting too high and damaging the panels while have a dual use as continued agri use. Best of both worlds.

These stripped bogs are highly suited to this sort of usage.

timmyntc

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/118576355#Comment_118576355

Majority of solar farms to date are not BnaM owned or on their bog land.

bk

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/118576402#Comment_118576402

Yes, sure, but the discussion was about BnaM building solar farms on their land. Some of the biggest up coming solar farms in Ireland will be on this sort of BnaM land and I'd rather them be there then on high quality farming land.

Having said that, if a farmer wants to put panels on their own land, who are we to tell them no?

Ireland already produces far more food then we eat and it plays a big part in our carbon emissions. It isn't a bad thing if some of this land was converted to solar, not only would you get the carbon free electricity, but it reduces emissions from diary farming.

And it isn't like the land can't still be used for agri, as I mentioned, it is often continues to be used for sheep.

gjim

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

Yes, there's a bit more to the equation than cheap but cost is easily the biggest factor when making decisions on building new electricity generation capacity. In the US, for example, there will be more solar PV capacity added to the grid in 2022 than ALL OTHER types of generation combined in 2022. This trend is not going to reverse - cheapness wins.

Fossil fuels are only cheap because of the legacy infrastructure and because people are not looking at recent developments in technology and prices. The Chinese pretty much went all-in on coal electricity based on cost numbers which were decades out of date. It turns out that coal is neither cheap nor reliable and this decision has backfire spectacularly with rolling blackouts in China during 2021 hammering the covid recovery. Where government is not by dictatorship or authoritarianism, the market has made a clear choice in favour of wind, solar and batteries for new generation and storage.

There is absolutely no shortage of unproductive land in Ireland - commercial forestry wouldn't exist otherwise. There's no need to talk about using 10% of the land for solar. Just 1% would provide over 50GW of capacity (8.4 million hectares on the island, 1.6 hectares per MW capacity). So just using a sixth of the "useless" land currently used for low-tech low-return commercial forestry would be enough to support a huge and rapid expansion of solar over the next 2 or 3 decades.

timmyntc

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/118576453#Comment_118576453

If a farmer wants to build a shed in a field he needs planning permission, why would solar panels be any different?

While Ireland has far too much land for grazing and not enough forestry cover, converting grazing land to solar farms is still a bad use of land. It is possible to decarbonise our grid without relying on 1000s of acres of PV panels - other forms of energy generation are both denser and more efficient (% of total capacity), which would stop us from wasting good land on solar farms.

Ireland could be a net carbon sink if we went from some grazing land to forestry, and used off shore wind and other energy sources that cannot be named in this thread instead - solar PV farms on good land is a total waste.

Capt'n Midnight

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/118576073#Comment_118576073

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

I'd assume SEAI are quoting worst case so people in Donegal don't complain. They are also quoting 150w/m2 which is only 15% efficiency rather than 20% or better panels available.

Regardless even at 10% panels on Bord Na Móna's waste land would provide the same as our annual electrical production.

cnocbui

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/118576492#Comment_118576492

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/118576453#Comment_118576453

If this poster is correct, there is some serious misrepresantation of agricultural emissions going on.

"The methane issue??

A cow emits 100kg of methane in a full year..

That's 2,800 kg's of CO2 equivalent for those who want to beef up their objection to cows.

However the 5 tonnes of grass that cow eats in a year to make the methane, took in over 9 tonnes of CO2 in the year, just to grow."

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/118515768/#Comment_118515768

specialbyte

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/118576301#Comment_118576301

This is some utter nonsense. Electricity prices are rising in countries with fossil fuel heavy grids because fossil fuel prices are rising. You're pointing to countries like France and Czech Republic with established nuclear industries avoiding fuel price rises because they are no where near as fossil fuel dependent as we are. The price rises have little if anything to do with renewables in Ireland and everything to do with rising gas prices. The solution is to continue moving away from gas towards wind, solar, interconnectors etc.

I'm a big fan of solar, but I'm not sure we'll ever really see much productive agricultural land change to solar farms. We shouldn't give permission to convert productive agricultural land to solar farming either when there is lots of unproductive land (like much of the BnM lands available). I do foresee in the next 10 years lots of farmers covering every shed in solar panels, particularly in dairy and chicken farming where electricity is a major cost factor. This won't be the cheapest electricity (on the macro-scale) but it will provide a solid payback for farmers so it will be worth doing.

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/118576279#Comment_118576279

Careful there, you are only giving one piece of the puzzle in your statement about Spain.

Yes Spains solar growth collapsed for a period after subsidies were removed however it should be noted that this coincided with the introduction of a punitive solar tax so they went from subsidising it, to penalising anyone who wanted a new system. Its been held up globally as the way "not" to do it as it effectively killed the solar industry there for a few years.

Those taxes were removed a few years later, and restrictions on home installations were also removed. Since then the total PV output has grown by 240% in the period from 2018-2020 going from 4.7GW to 11.5GW. In fact they are now aiming to reach 74% of electricity generation by 2030, from wind and solar which are currently at 14 & 9% respectively

https://www.iea.org/reports/spain-2021

timmyntc

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/118576521#Comment_118576521

I'd be surprised if SEAI low-balled it just to stop complaints - if they are trying to encourage uptake of solar PV in the home it wouldnt make sense to undersell it like that.

All of Bord na Monas land covered in PV panels would more than cover our current annual usage - if we had the storage to compensate for it.

Given the diurnal and seasonal effects on solar PV output, it requires a very large amount of storage. Specifically because of the seasonal effects, you would need a lot of long-term storage (not pumped or battery) to get you through the poor production seasons (half Autumn/Winter/half Spring).

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/118576607#Comment_118576607

This brings up the question of how do we calculate emissions. A sizeable amount of carbon will be "sequestered" by that cow itself during its lifetime as it grows, and when we eat it we will absorb some and release the rest via our various bodily functions. Does that mean that by eating cows we are sequestering the carbon that they sequestered when they ate the grass that sequestered the carbon from the air? It's all a bit woman who swallowed a fly.

Where do you start and where do you end measuring co2 emissions then?

bk

"If a farmer wants to build a shed in a field he needs planning permission, why would solar panels be any different?"

Oh, absolutely, of course it should have planning permission!

If it impinges on a neighbour or something like that, of course it should be looked at. However what I meant is I don't see any general objection to land being used for Solar.

Of course I'd prefer to see the land like the BnaM land being used first and foremost. But the odd solar farm here or there isn't going to to have any significant impact on our agri business or food production. As gjim points out even covering 1% of land with Solar would be MASSIVELY beyond our needs.

To be honest, this feels like a very minor issue. In reality we will get most of our renewable energy from Wind. Solar might eventually make up 10% or so, so the amount of land that will be used for Solar will be a tiny amount of our land and hopefully mostly on unproductive land like BnaM's.

BTW, I totally agree that I'd like to see far more forestry done here. Though I'd like to see far more native forests planted then just Sitka. At least a better balance.

bob mcbob

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/118575942#Comment_118575942

Yes pretty cheap for an R&D trial that may dictate the future of domestic heating for decades to come

cnocbui

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/118576680#Comment_118576680

The fossil fuel prices are rising because the energy expected from renewables didn't eventuate due to a lack of wind. This expectation saw erroneous decisions made regarding not needing to stockpile gas in the summer because so much new renewable capacity had been added. And in a perfect storm, the German's stupidly turned off some of their nukes, further increasing demand for fossil fuels, regardless of the obvious lack of output from renewables - talk about blindly driving off a cliff edge you can plainly see because the satnav tells you to. And as if that weren't enough, the French have offlined a few nuclear power staions because of a discovery of some cracks that needed repairing. Furthermore, there has been a push in Europe to reduce coal consumption for CO2 reasons, and to replace that lost generation capacity with even more gas.

Supply and demand - demand for fossil fuels went up so the price followed, and all of it because of deliberate attempts to rely on renewables and deliberate nonsense by the Greens in Germany to turn off perfecty good, green nuclear reactors. Talk about shooting yourself in the foot in an attempt to have your cake and eat it too.

josip

And as if that weren't enough, the French have offlined a few nuclear power stations because of a discovery of some cracks that needed repairing.

What point are you making here? That some cracks have been enough to take a number of nuclear power stations offline or that they didn't need to be taken offline? How long will it take to fix these cracks?

tom1ie

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/118575589#Comment_118575589

Will the grassland not sequester more CO2 than the solar might stop being produced?

Just a thought.

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/118577510#Comment_118577510

Grass can still grow under solar panels

tom1ie

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/118577560#Comment_118577560

Ok.

So what is everyone getting excited about?

Carbon sequestration and reduction in carbon produced for energy. A double whammy!!

bk

Exactly, here is what solar panels in a field look like:

I think people imagine that nothing grows under solar panels. It couldn't be further from the truth, still plenty of great growth under panels, In fact the issue is that it can grow too fast and needs to be cut back so it doesn't over grow the panels. Which is why increasingly they use sheep grazing on the land to control it, thus a triple whammy really.

Also the growth tends to be far more biodiverse then a typical farm field, as it tends towards wild grassland and wild flower meadows and plants, which can be excellent for bees, etc. Plus the panels can be quiet attractive for animals to shelter under.

If you wanted to go full-on into agrivoltaics you could do something like these.

There's a few folks I know who sell fruit & veg at farmers markets who are looking into something like the first pic

RandomViewer

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

You do know that hydrogen is odourless and an odour can't be added, it also has an almost clear flame that doesn't heat much air around it,makes metal brittle as well, lots of stuff to sort before useful

Sam Russell

Mod: Nuclear is creeping back into his thread.

josip

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/118577853#Comment_118577853

Sheep have a similar methane hoofprint per hectare as beef, so shouldn't they be counted as a negative in your whammy metric rather than a positive?

https://kb.wisc.edu/dairynutrient/375fsc/page.php?id=80721