Blackouts loom this winter

Jonathan

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/117983788#Comment_117983788

Yes, and the same thing if you buy your residential electricity from SSE, Energia, or one of the "100% green" electricity suppliers.

If you don't have solar on your house, you can be assured that your electrons are coming from a dinosaur-fueled power plant during the summer months, irrespective of your supplier. The wind just ain't blowing.

josip

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/117983856#Comment_117983856

Since we're on the subject of bursting bubbles and dispelling myths, there aren't any dinosaurs in coal or gas. Sorry.

https://www.sciencenewsforstudents.org/article/explainer-where-fossil-fuels-come

the_amazing_raisin

I think one thing that everyone is skipping over is that a lot of these generators that shut down weren't necessarily for climate reasons, it was because they couldn't compete in the energy market here. I know Hunstown was on the ropes a while ago because they only got a contract for 1 of the 2 generators there and the plant wasn;t econimical to operate at the prices demanded

As demand increases, then rightly we should be adding more supply. Unfortunately the view of Eirgrid seems to be to invest in keeping coal and oil power plants going for the short term. It's probably the easy option, but somewhat shortsighted

In my view there needs to be a complete overhaul of the planning process for wind turbines and large scale solar PV to get them up and running faster, as well as investment in pumped hydro and batteries.

As a nation, we also need to get a lot better at responding to energy availability. I've noticed that nobody has said there's going to be a shortage of energy at night, so why can't we start moving more power hungry stuff to night time? In the case of DCs, doing stuff like backups isn't time critical and can be done out of hours

The best thing to do with electricity is to use it, storing in batteries or hydro or making hydrogen is just introducing waste and extra costs

We'll need some storage for sure, but pricing the market to encourage usage during off peak times would vastly reduce the amount of storage required

reklamos

There is a lot of stuff done during the night(including backups) in DCs. The problem is that DC power demand is driven by humans. There are not many who do their Amazon shopping at night or watch Netflix at 3am. So the load does go down substantially during the night on DCs. Now of course a possible solution could be to stream netwflix from Ireland to US during the night but that adds additional latency and cost. This is the reason why we have CDNs that keep content as close to the user as possible. There's also licensing, data protection etc. which means the DCs are working normal hours as the country/region they are in.

bullit_dodger

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/117984354#Comment_117984354

I don't think that the default view of Eirgrid is to add more gas/coal. They have the same problem that many countries have, is that there need to be a mix. If Eirgrid goes full bore onto say, Wind and gets approval for say 10 wind farms, while it'd great to see that happen, I don't think we (Joe public) would be too happy when a massive bout of pleasant weather sits over the British isles for 6 weeks and we can't boil a kettle cause the wind isn't blowing.

Going "Sorry lads - we got it wrong" isn't really an option. So they need to balance risk against all other competing priorities - and while I don't like to see it, I understand the need for a gas fired station.

Moving load is generally a good idea, and I think there's few people who's argue against that.... but the reality is that people come home from work, turn the kettles on, kids fire up the xbox, people all make meals at roughly the same time. These "spikes" in daily usage are hard to shift. Some of it can be done by smart time based tarrifs, where people pay more for doing stuff at peak hours, but it's a hard problem.

Honestly, the more I look into Eirgrid and the challanges they have, the more respect I have for them. Not easy.

unkel

@bullit_dodger - we need an awful lot more sun and wind electricity. Combined with an awful lot more storage (batteries). So in that sunny period, wind doesn't play much of a role, but solar + batteries does. And in that cold period, sun doesn't play any role, but wind + batteries does

Combine that with a very large bandwidth of interconnector exchanges between Ireland and (far away) countries, the reliance on fossil fuels should be minimal (maybe a couple of gas plants for backup ONLY in say 15-25 years from now)

reklamos

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/117985008#Comment_117985008

That requires combined long term thinking and investment which we all know is not the case in ROI.

bullit_dodger

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/117985008#Comment_117985008

100% - couldn't agree more unkel, and if I was "King" (LOL) I'd have 200% of our "max load" generating in renewables, over producing and pumping the excess into long term storage. Be that molten batteries, lithium, ferrite batteries, or one of the other long term storage options like compressed air, hydrogen, etc. But most of those technologies while they show some promise, they haven't been scaled yet. No doubt in my mind - none so whatsoever, that they'll get the scale thing worked out......but and here's the crux, will consumers (think your neighbor, or your parents if they are still alive), would they be happy paying 2x the price of leccie, even if it was "green".

That's the thing - has to be fiscally viable, and I'm optimistic there. It will come. Even the "ahh sure feckit begorha" mentality of Ireland will adopt anything where it just "makes sense" to save a few quid.

My point was (and I don't know if you saw the National development plan there yesterday?) was in the context of that new gas fired generator which got approval. We aren't there yet in terms of being able to distance ourselves from gas/coal. I wish it wasn't the case, but sadly it's where we are.

Also in terms of pumped storage - right now it's the best (arguable) storage mechanism we have for instant dispatching of loads into the grid. Gas/coal/oil all take a while to spin up. Opening the gate and letting the water flow is pretty quick.

unkel

I'm also pretty optimistic. In that it can easily and cheaply be done. Wind is supercheap and Ireland (west coast) has the best wind conditions for electricity generation in the world (at about 50% yearly yield of the max rated capacity, which is astonishingly good). With the €13 billion that Apple owe us we could generate about 300% of current total yearly electricity consumption. That's a tiny investment and indeed should cost the Irish tax payer nothing.

Solar is actually also very good in this country with a solar PV panel south facing in one of the better areas (roughly the east) getting about 50% of the yield of the best places for solar on earth. A lot of people don't know this, but the colder it is, the better PV works. Obviously this is a small country and we can't plaster every field with solar. We have to be realistic. But a few giant solar farms in remote areas and of course covering most of existing buildings with solar is a good target

Then the interconnector capacity. And of course GWHs of lithium battery storages. A million private EV vehicles and half a million commercial EV vehicles alone would give 100GWh of storage. Not too hard to add another 100GWh of grid and home attached lithium storage. Plus pumped hydro, plus hydrogen production and storage for heating and industry / shipping fuel.

None of this is hard, all old school tech at this stage and none of this is prohibitively expensive to do. We just need to get off our arses and get on with it.

Ubbquittious

Would this problem be sorted if we had a small nuclear power station? For example 4x 500MW reactors so hopefully 3 online at any given time + mass adoption (1GW+) of solar?

Are the datacentres first in line for any load shedding due to occur? Do they even have a means of easily load shedding a particular data centre?

unkel

Nuclear looks like a good solution, low emissions, very little footprint and enormous energy out of little resources. But nuclear is a past station. It is far too expensive and no longer helpful (provided you have a good load of cheap renewables and some gas back up). Current nuclear (in other countries like France) can stay and is good for the interconnector while those other countries increase their renewables, but building new ones is simply not economical.

bullit_dodger

Dunno what the order is actually. I do know that the companies who help facilitate the load shifting get preferential rates (rightly) but I don't know what the priority it. If anyone knows, please share as I'm curious

Datacenters can move some of their loads to batteries (which they may have charged at night) for example, but in terms of actually reducing the consumption that might be consumed between 3pm and 4pm for example, difficult to do.

Unkel: Yeah the efficiency of the panels is as good here as pretty much anywhere. it's just that we're stuck at 53 north and while that works for us in the summer for long days, the winter of course.....<left unsaid>. Can't see beyond wind as the backbone for us here. Or wave. you never hear anything much about wave. A few pilot projects, one in the Shetlands as I recall, but some of the best wave energy hits us in the world.

Great free PDF I read some years ago for people is here. David MacKay FRS: : Contents (withouthotair.com) (Download up on the top left)

Solar panels section is a bit pants as it was written about 2010 and the price/efficiency of panels went through the floor soon after that was published, so it's to be taken in the context of 2010......but it does have all the renewable techs there. (Wave, tidal, etc) Wish the guy would update it ......

Ubbquittious

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/117985185#Comment_117985185

We don't have a good load of cheap renewables and there is a good chance we won't get them either. Any reactor that is built here would have to be small and modular and without much of the baggage that comes with traditional nuclear power stations. It should be possible to get costs down that way.

There just isn't a hope they're going to meet their EU target of almost feck all emmissions in 20-25 years time even if they plaster the whole country with wind turbines and solar.

The entire country won't be running off lithium ion batteries in private cars either on cold winter evenings because they are too greedy to offer a feed-in tariff that would make it worthwhile for the EV owner.

Ubbquittious

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/117985275#Comment_117985275

Interesting read !

There was only one real wave power station operating on Islay but they closed it in 2012. I wonder why

bullit_dodger

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/117985721#Comment_117985721

Presumably they couldn't make it fiscally viable. :-(

Loads of different ways to harness energy from waves and they do have a lot of potential/kinetic energy, but it's a hostile place the sea. All well and good on a nice summer's day, but in the middle of January with a storm coming from the Atlantic....man those things would take a beating. Hard to engineer them to be resilient, without costing a fortune. But maybe someday someone will come up with an idea. Nice to see people thinking about these things though - you don't try, you never do.

I like solar, but Wind is where our grid money will go and hopefully in 20+ years we'll have as unkel said some kind of European energy sharing interconnectored network where we can buy solar from spain or Italy in our quiet months and then we can flog on our excess windy March/April etc. to them.

Going back to original point, the latest on the blackouts I heard was that it will be fine. I think the words used were "it will be tight... but manageable".

garo

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/117985645#Comment_117985645

If you plaster the whole country with wind turbines you will have enough electricity for Ireland and the UK. Not sure what your definition of "plaster the whole country" is. Right now we have 5.5GW of installed capacity on the island. We are really far from plastering the whole country and yet we get about 40% of our electricity from reneables. If you could install 5x the current number we could go -ve emissions by exporting our excess to other countries. And it would still take up a small fraction of land.

SortingYouOut

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/117985185#Comment_117985185

Uranium price looks to be steadily increasing, so some see it as a good buy for the future and might expect more mining for enrichment to increase those prices further. Harnassing and storing the power of the sun is key and if we're lucky, our children's children might get to enjoy the benefits of fusion. Which would be HUGE if they manage to bring it to sustainable net energy.

josip

Will the Kent cable fire have any impact on us here in Ireland this winter?

https://www.theguardian.com/business/2021/oct/07/winter-blackout-risk-great-britain-rises-after-cable-fire

Are we relying on there being a surplus available from the UK via the interconnector for any of scenarios?

peterofthebr

so what are the odds we have some blackouts this winter, as JOSEPH asks above..we might need what normally is sent to us. I'm wondering if getting a 100w solar panel for phone,laptop use etc...

bullit_dodger

Well a 100w panel by itself isn't going to do much for you. You'll need some kind of battery and inverter to store the energy you capture from the sun.

More likely though probably a waste of time/effort/money. Any blackout which will happen will be of the hours (single digits) timeframe at most for an area. The way they do these type of things as I understand it (and if anyone know definitively , please educate me/us) is that they'll pick an area it'll go offline for 30 mins or so, then they move onto the next area. So that a specific area isn't being "picked on" and bearing the brunt of the shortfall.

If your mobile phone or laptop can't manage being off the mains for an hour or two, perhaps time to upgrade (your phone/laptop that is) ?

Hasschu

I have spoken to a Mechanical Engineer relative from Dublin about the Irish aversion to Nuclear Generators. He tells me that people do not trust either the Irish Gov't or Irish Companies to manage it responsibly. In Canada where I am now the concensus is that Nuclear Generating plants must be owned and operated by elected Gov'ts and under no circumstance can responsibility be fobbed off to the private sector. Presently CO2 free generating consists of Hydro and Nuclear which accounts for roughly 30 to 35% of the base load. Renewables amount to 3-5% of the base load. Fossil fuels power the rest now becoming increasingly Natural Gas as Coal, Diesel and Bunker C is being phased out. I have a brother who has worked on nuclear generating plants in the UK, France and Canada who tells me that Sellafield in England and Point Lepreau in Canada are two of the best built and managed nuclear generating plants he has worked on. France is a world leader in nuclear plants of a scale suitable for use in Ireland. Areva is their leading nuclear manufacturing company. Areva is a company with a reputation worth preserving which makes them a good choice to build and operate in Ireland. That would not relieve the Irish Gov't of responsibility to own and be completely responsible for nuclear generating plants in Ireland. I myself am experienced on supplying uninterruptible power on 24 X 7 X 365 basis. I used Main Power supply in conjunction with continuosly idling diesel engines coupled via a clutch which engaged on Main Power failure to generators that took 30 to 60 seconds to get up to normal operating voltage. The 30 to 60 seconds was taken care of by Lead-Acid battery banks. These were used for Air Traffic Control Centres, Control Towers and local and regional Radars. We are talking hundreds of KiloWatts and myself out of work if it failed. I can safely say that stationary mass storage at large scale is exorbitantly expensive.

Ubbquittious

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/118002606#Comment_118002606

So basically a few fellas saying "Ah shur Jaysus begorrah Paddy Irishman can't be trusted with a nuke plant, shur he'd be found asleep beside the control panel with an empty bottle of Paddy Power on the floor beside him" is what is actually holding the country back, eventually costing us billions in EU fines for pumping out too much CO2 and causing energy shortages. Back when they built Ardnacrusha nearly 100 years ago it was one of the most ambitious projects going but now the prevailing mentality is "Ah shur we Irish could never do it, lets not bother trying"?

KCross

I'd say the biggest issue to nuclear in this country is where to put any proposed nuclear plant.

NIMBYism would be off the richter scale for that and logical arguments about safety and how close sellafield already is etc would count for nothing. No community would accept it and it would hence be political suicide for that part of the country.

bullit_dodger

If this was the 1980's again, nuclear would be a good option - even though it was categorically shot down back then (Cairnsore pt in Wexford). When I say good option, I mean that in context of environmentally green - safety issues aside. As long as it's well operated and maintained, I don't really buy the

"ahhe shure begoragh - t'will be grand"

mentality that Ireland couldn't do it. Enough smart people here to do it - Father Ted and Dougal aside :-) However, the financials just aren't there anymore. The price per Kw for wind and solar (especially wind) has come down so much in the past 3x decades that it runs rings around nuclear now. You could build like 5-10 reasonably large wind farms for the cost a nuclear plant, couple that to some medium term storage (molten salt batteries perhaps) and you have a winner.

That said, every country needs a solid percentage of generation available for when the wind doesn't blow or the sun ain't shining. For us it'll be Gas/coal fired stations with (I hope) state of the art carbon capture. Hard to see us beyond that.

Mickeroo

The aversion to nuclear power in Ireland comes from the campaigning against it back in the late 80s/90s after the Chernobyl disaster. Remember all the scaremongering in the news about Sellafield? It's sown a deep seated (yet for the most part illogical) cultural opposition to it in a whole generation of Irish people.

That would be the first hurdle to overcome, then you have the nimbysim aspect to contend with as @KCross said. Sure you'd swear mobile phone masts have nuclear reactors in them the way people go on once there's a chance of one going up in their area as it is 🤣

bullit_dodger

Ahh your being silly now. Everyone knows the mobile phone masts are related to the covid spread via 5G! Nuclear reactors...sheez. Where do people get these ideas!

Jokes aside, I'm old enough to remember Cairnsore Pt, and it was long before Chernobyl, but not long after 3 mile island that the anti-nuclear lobby got into gear.

RTÉ Archives | Environment | Anti-Nuclear Rally at Carnsore Point (rte.ie)

It's a shame really as nuclear, when done properly can be a safe system. Reactors today are designed so much better than their predecessors.

Ubbquittious

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/118004005#Comment_118004005

Even if they have no intention of building a nuclear power plant it would be a good idea to start bringing out proposals to build one again. It would mobilise all the NIMBYs and provide a good distraction while they throw up a couple of more wind farms

bullit_dodger

LOL - I like that idea. Still though plenty of forthcoming projects in the pipeline such as

Dublin Array – Offshore Wind Farm Project

I think getting approval for Wind is relatively easy these days. Couple of other projects yet to be put out for tender in the National development plan released there a few days ago.

bullit_dodger

Thought this article would be a good reason to restart this thread.....

'Enough is enough': Cowen says those responsible for energy crisis must be held accountable (thejournal.ie)

Ubbquittious

It is too late for them to do anything now really. Maybe they can come up with a good load-shedding plan and spend the next two months praying to the Lord for a warm but windy winter. I'm sure it was obvious to everyone that the CRU wasnt fit for purpose when they let their golf buddies get away with offering a 0c feed in tariff

bullit_dodger

 I'm sure it was obvious to everyone that the CRU wasnt fit for purpose when they let their golf buddies get away with offering a 0c feed in tariff

Not sure I follow. I mean I get that a €0.00 floor was odd, but they all delivered way more than we were expecting (€0.13/14 and some even €0.19). I was expecting a €0.05 personally. That's not to say that I think the CRU are doing a good job (hell no), just that I don't follow the logic that a €0.00 floor was some backhander deal. They deployed a strategy of letting the market decide, and the market came up with a decent FIT. That worked in our favour, no?

Ubbquittious

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/119532703#Comment_119532703

Yes the feed in tariff by some companies is more than expected but there is nothing preventing them from dropping it back to 0 later this winter when the going gets tough and there's still a few that haven't brought out any I think.

garo

The problem is not the feed in tariff though. The problem is lack of generation capacity. And Eirgrid says the market mechanism has failed completely. Mr. Market is not very good at planning for the future when it comes to a public good.

bullit_dodger

Yup - get all that and agree with you, and as mentioned I think the CRU have done a pretty poor job over all. No, I was just commenting in relation to the €0.00 FIT floor, as odd as that is, I'm not so sure that I'd go as far as to think that it's some "bankhander to golf buddies".

I mean you can see conspiracy theories everywhere if you start looking for them.

garo

Yeah agree with you on all that. Never ascribe to malice what can be ascribed to mere incompetence.