"Green" policies are destroying this country
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The amount of gas we have been burning has not reduced because of renewables. It has been increasing barring a small dip in 2021, but that does not tell the full story as regards 2021.
"The use of both coal and oil for electricity generation more than tripled in 2021, accounting for 14% and 7.5% of energy input for electricity generation respectively" Source : SEAI Interim Energy Balance 2021
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It's getting hard to keep up with the amount of obfuscation, lies and FUD being spread around here. But let's tackle a few of them.
Akrasia: The transition to renewables should involve building the absolute minimum new fossil fuel infrastructure that we can get away with. The costs of failing to address climate change are much higher than the cost of changing our energy infrastructure.
A good example of the typical obfuscation: who is "we" and "our" in this statement? Ireland's entire net zero efforts will reduce global warming by 0.0°C. Therefore, every penny we spend on mitigation will save zero pennies of climate change damage. Therefore, contrary to the above statement, the cost of Ireland failing to address climate change is ZERO. We are spending vast sums on a literal vanity project which threatens to cripple our economy.
It would be hilarious if it weren't so tragic -- see up-thread where China just waved their hand and called for 300 million tonnes more coal to be produced because of their worries about other energy sources. Work it out! -- the additional CO2 emissions every year would be twenty times Ireland's 2030 emission reduction goals. Eamon Ryan's determination to be the good boy of European energy policy at the expense of our economy is not just stupid, it's utterly futile. Global warming is a global problem, remember?
Akrasia: If we had begun building offshore wind when Scotland did, we wouldn't need those new gas turbines. If we introduce regulations that require heavy energy users, like industry and data centers to have their own on site storage to reduce their impact on peak demand, we would need fewer gas turbines.
Uh, we started building offshore wind years before Scotland did, back in the early 2000s. I suspect you are referring to the much later major Scottish expansion in 2016. Our own next phase of expansion commencing with ORESS is almost entirely in the Irish Sea, a low wind area compared to the Atlantic offshore and with a small geographical spread. The Greenies tend to confuse this with the 30GW of offshore wind that Eamon Ryan has been yakking on about but which is a mere glint in his eye and based on highly experimental technologies. And no, it wouldn't get rid of the need for new gas turbines because wind power is not even allowed bid on the capacity market due to ... well, due to not being able to provide firm capacity.
Industry and data centres have to provide their own storage? Are you barking mad? Do you even understand why a utility scale power grid exists? What sort of storage are you talking about? The only feasible storage that exists for this scale of energy is diesel fuel. You're saying every large electricity user has to become a supplier in their own right. And you better be allowing them to sell diesel-fired electricity back to the grid, otherwise you are effectively telling industry that Ireland cannot provide them with electricity and they need to pay the cost of going off grid. How much inward investment do you think we're going to attract with third world policies like those?
Akrasia: If the government took ownership over installation of solar and upgrading to electric heating instead of deferring to the market with grants and incentives that lead to abuse and feet dragging... If this was treated with the urgency it demands we could do an awful lot to cut our reliance on fossil fuels. The worst thing is, all of the changes needed make financial sense in the medium term. They save money and improve air quality and make people's homes more economical and warmer places to live. The pace of action is glacial in this country. We could be doing a lot more.
Yeah, because governments are so efficient at running things, especially when mandating economically dubious schemes. You sound like Ivana Bacik the other day calling for the government to nationalise the Corrib gas field. God save us from socialist lunatics. Have a look at Venezuela for an example of energy nationalisation gone horribly wrong, and that was with a fossil fuel industry that was actually insanely profitable.
It's been explained to you many times before on here, people can't afford the costs of energy upgrades for marginal paybacks. If the discounted future value of such upgrades was so great, people would be flocking to them without needing any incentives.
As for the glacial pace of action -- don't worry your head about it as it just means it'll take us a bit longer to save the 0.0°C of warming that our efforts will result in.
Akrasia: If the wind is insufficient, and the solar is insufficient and the pumped hydro runs out, and the interconnectors are insufficient, and battery storage is depleted and peak shaving is not an option, then the Gas turbines may be needed
In other words, they'll be needed more than 60% of the time. That's before Eamon Ryan's plans to electrify some of the rest of the 86% of our primary energy that comes from fossil fuels. So we'll basically move some of our heating and transport fuels to natural gas-powered electricity. That actually sounds quite bad for diversity of supply. I'd be prepared to bet that, barring constraints on supply, we'll be using more natural gas in 2030 than in 2022.
Akrasia: I honestly don't care. If we need to pay a bit more for energy, that's a political problem. It can be fixed later on if we need to. Delaying the transition will cost us more in the long run. The marginal cost of renewable power is very cheap. I would prefer if the government built the infrastructure and kept them in public ownership, but they chose to auction them off. That's fine, as long as we're moving in the right direction
Yeah, it's pretty obvious you don't care. You're right about the political problem though, and that it will be fixed later on -- when the Greens get booted out of government by popular demand.
The marginal cost of renewable power is cheap? Here's the cost per megawatt hour on the European single-day-ahead (SDAC) energy market for 2019 -- even though Ireland is more expensive than most it's basically half the RESS 2 auction price for onshore wind from June of this year:
Akrasia: The eye wateringly high energy prices are because of Putin and Gas prices. Moving to renewables takes them out of the equation. And it's likely that very soon the EU will end it's marginal pricing policy and energy prices will fall for consumers because of renewables.
Da Cor: Splitting the marginal pricing model will be the death of fossil fuels. They simply won't be able to compete. Works for me
You guys must be as dumb as a box of rocks. The EU was grappling with emergency provisions last winter, long before Putin's war began. All the options -- from windfall taxes to price-capping low cost generators were discussed. France and Spain (along with Italy, Greece, and Romania) were arguing for prices to reflect the cost of generation from their low-carbon suppliers. Quote: "We must act in the short term in order to ensure that consumers perceive the benefits of zero emissions technologies in prices signals while protecting them from the increasing volatility of natural gas markets".
The European Commission argued that "Changing the current model poses risks to market predictability, competitiveness and our clean energy transition". A second group of nine countries agreed with the EC and declared: "We cannot support any measure that would represent a departure from the competitive principles of our electricity and gas market design". Guess which group Ireland was in? ... yeah, the second one which was arguing for wind generators to benefit from the marginal pricing scheme. By the way, Spain went ahead and tried to cap prices for their lower cost low-carbon suppliers. They government got hauled through the courts, back-pedalled several times, and ended up saving nothing.
The latest EU proposals are not about abandoning the marginal pricing model in favour of wind power. Wind generates about 15% of European electricity and can't even bid on the capacity market, so this would be folly. No, they are about temporary caps on all lower cost suppliers. The price would be €180/MWh until next March, still brutally expensive compared to historic norms, and they would apply as much to German lignite as to Irish wind. These ideas were being kicked around the European Commission last February, before the Ukraine war and an MIT paper ("Power price crisis in the EU: Unveiling current policy responses and proposing a balanced regulatory remedy") described them as "at least remarkable, if not jaw-dropping". The authors argue: "We criticize the implementation of windfall profit taxes and mandated auctions for bilateral contracts by discussing their static and dynamic implications. In the short run, these measures risk altering the efficient dispatch. More important than any static issue are the dynamic issues; they increase the regulatory risk and thus the required return on capital for investors, which is especially relevant as renewables are very capital intense. As such, they will make the EU energy transition slower and costlier".
Akrasia: The wind never stops. It just moves around
That must be why wind power cannot be bid on the firm capacity market, huh?
Akrasia: The price of generating from renewables has not increased (apart from the general inflation causing everything to get more expensive)
It must be nice not to have to connect with reality in your arguments. Makes everything easier. This is the second time you've claimed that the price of renewables hasn't increased. The Irish Wind Energy Association themselves bemoaned the fact that auction prices had gone up 30% in two years, and they're hardly a shill for the competition. What's more, you are ignoring how renewables can actually be contributing to the inflation at least as far as certain commodities are concerned, e.g. by using an order of magnitude more copper than other generation approaches. Another thing you haven't even thought about is the headwinds for high capital cost projects in the face of rising interest rates. That Scottish offshore wind you were banging on about came in at c. £5m per megawatt of capacity back in 2016 -- five times more than conventional fossil fuel capacity. Wind power saves later on fuel costs, of course, but the up front cost of finance for future capital intensive projects is about to explode as we go from zero interest rates to something much higher.
Akrasia: The amount of gas we need to burn has reduced significantly due to renewables taking up the slack. The price to consumers has not come down because of an EU SEM pricing policy, but this can be changed with the stroke of a pen (and most likely will be pretty soon)
Another poster already pointed out to you that it is simply wrong that we are using less gas. And see my note above about getting rid of the EU marginal pricing policy, which the MIT paper believes would slow down the transition to renewables. Personally I wouldn't care -- when the gas market rebalances, renewables would get crucified. Be careful what you wish for.
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Here's the latest fuel mix chart from smartgriddashboard.com. Currently renewables are contributing only 4%. What happens if we get a prolonged period of calm anti-cyclonic conditions in Ireland? To make it worse what if they occur in winter combined with low temperatures?
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