"Green" policies are destroying this country
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As electricity consumers we have gotten spoiled by being able to walk into a dark room, turn on a light switch, any time day or night. Lately the cost of that has many parents scolding their children with the familiar "Turn off the lights, do you think I'm made of money?".
Random energy generation sources like wind and solar are unreliable and adding their output to the grid imposes management overhead costs that are currently not borne by the generators themselves, us consumers pay that. The price of electricity is the transmission cost (infrastructure) + highest cost bidder and in this case it is gas. The wind generator operators are not complaining, they are literally earning "windfall" profits on the back of gas prices.
Alternating current has to be maintained by Eirgrid at a frequency of 50Hz. Little deviation from this figure is allowed.
The highest demand for electricity happens during cold weather, the lower the temperature the more demand for electricity. The highest demand of all time in Ireland, occurred on 21 December 2010, 17:30.
As demand by consumers (domestic and industrial) increases during the day, the frequency starts to drop below 50Hz and more power generation needs to be bought online. This is why the grid operator has to pay attention to events like the World cup final and years ago, Coronation Street, so many people turned the kettle on during the ad breaks. When demand cannot be met by generators, Eirgrid takes demand management steps, some high demand industrial users have an agreement to disconnect from the grid and fall back on their own generation, usually diesel generators. If this is not enough, Eirgrid can cut the flow to some substations and some consumers experience a blackout. If they did not take this action the entire grid would collapse quickly. Restarting Irelands electrical grid (called a black start) would be difficult and take several weeks to complete, losses would also ensue to consumers through loss of production and damaged electrical equipment. Such a situation is to be avoided.
On the other hand when there is too much generation, the excess power must be curtailed by Eirgrid and dumped, this is wasteful and also expensive because the costs of that curtailment are passed to us consumers. There are other technical issues caused by having wind and solar on the grid. I'll not get into them here.
Onshore wind has a capacity factor of 25%, offshore wind is 35% and solar is 11%, this means their output is variable and to maintain a stable grid other generation sources must be on standby. In Ireland, the generation system uses a combination of coal, natural gas, gas peaker and oil to make up the generation shortfalls when the wind stops blowing. The country has inter-connectors to the UK, depending on market demand the country exports electricity from gas generation. If you look at the following graph, you can see wind generation for Ireland drop to minus 2 MW on March 1st for two hours this year. It does not matter how many wind turbines there are, no wind = no generation. There are not batteries big enough or cheap enough to manage a situation like that, their function in Ireland is maintain stability, batteries are not generators.
Electrical grids that use wind and solar are entirely dependent on natural gas peaker plants and other standby generators to make up the shortfalls. Germany now burns more coal generating electricity than when they started the energy transition (Energiewende), this was before the Russo-Ukraine war, they also have a word for a condition when the wind does not blow and the sun does not shine called dunkelflaute. Due to the unreliable nature of wind and solar generation, Germany can rarely have scenarios where there is so much power generated and they have to pay consumers to use the power, the problem with this is the cost of that is borne by the other generators (coal & gas), the coal and gas generators recoup their costs as peak demand each day, they can command higher prices because they can generate power on demand. These plants do have their economic limits, there have been situations were the price being offered is not worth their while and they have refused to supply power, it took grovelling from the German grid operator to get the Polish and Swiss companies to prevent a loss of power to some regions in Germany on one occasion.
Net Zero means we are paying for the destruction of our economy and society in pursuit of an unachievable and pointless policy.
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