"Green" policies are destroying this country

Danno

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/120051246#Comment_120051246

tipping points will be crossed

LOLs! You'd be forgiven for thinking the climate is like an Irish Mammy and once you "dare" her, she'll get the rolling pins out and give you an unmerciful belt.

If anything, the opposite is true - we've observed storm intensity affecting Ireland and wind speeds in general to be on the decrease as the temperature contrast between the poles and the equatorial regions softens. Which, inadvertently is very bad news for anyone sticking up a wind whirly in the hope of sustaining themselves with renewable energy.

Danno

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/120051280#Comment_120051280

From your article:

Options listed in the document include the development of a State-owned gas storage facility that could be filled from the gas network and used strategically, operating during periods in which there is a material risk of demand disruptions in Ireland.

Public comments from Mr Ryan in recent weeks suggest he is supportive of this proposal.

However, the review also sets out other options including the use of floating LNG terminals during times when there is a risk of disruption in supplies to Ireland. The Government has not joined several other European countries in seeking to secure such floating terminals.

Eamon Ryan wants a state owned gas storage solution yet from the other side of his mouth he doesn't want any C02 emitting energy sources. The option of having a private company stump up the funds to build an LNG storage facility in the Shannon Estuary was opposed.

Shows what ER thinks of taxpayers money to waste such money on a storage solution on the public purse while simultaneously opposing a privately funded exercise, and to double down - he doesn't sign on to an EU approved programme of securing floating LNG options.

If this was a private company, he'd be fired on the spot for such financial negligence let alone the absolute dereliction of duty to secure gas supplies to back up his regularly failing renewable pet projects in terms of electricity generation.

And yet he wants to heap more pressure on said electricity generation via heat pumps and EV charging.

Akrasia

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/120051332#Comment_120051332

We don't need computer modelling to see the effects of the climate change we've already caused. We're on track for 3 times as much warming.

This actually means some places will warm by much more than 3c as that's how averages work, and urban, highly populated areas warm more because of the UHI.

antoinolachtnai

glad you have now accepted that Eamon Ryan supports gas storage. But such is your hatred that you have embarked on a further tangent.

A privately owned terminal would result in a surcharge for the gas customers to cover costs of the pipelines.

The private company would finance the LNG terminal but the gas customers would have to pay for it.

whet is the purpose this terminal would serve that compressed gas storage would not serve? What actual risk would it mitigate?

Danno

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/120051477#Comment_120051477

whet is the purpose this terminal would serve that compressed gas storage would not serve? What actual risk would it mitigate?

Well thats a good question - and very glad you asked. An Lng terminal build by private enterprise is of course going to do so for profit first and foremost. That saves the taxpayer quite a dime on investment. Secondly, an Lng will have enough gas to get us through when, not if, your pet wind twirlys fail to generate enough power (which in fairness is something like ~65% of the time).

Need I say more?

Think HSE and how they "contract" outside agencies.

Akrasia

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/120051507#Comment_120051507

We had a privately owned gas storage facility. Guess what happened next?

antoinolachtnai

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/120051507#Comment_120051507

There is plenty of gas supply through the three pipelines. There is no shortage and no realistic possibility of a shortage.

You haven’t explained what risk you think this LNG terminal would mitigate despite agreeing that this was a good question.

Your analogy is false. When the HSE contracts in outside agencies it does so because it doesn’t have enough capacity. But the gas network has loads of capacity. Gas customers would still have to pay for this capacity through network charges and the LNG operator who would be importing gas at a low LNG price and selling it at a cent below the higher Moffat price and using the difference to fund the LNG terminal.

To continue the analogy, what you are proposing is like the private sector building a new hospital beside an existing hospital and the HSE sending all the customers to the new hospital whilst the old hospital is left fully staffed and maintained but bereft of patients. That would obviously be a stupid idea.

It doesn’t save a dime in investment for the State or citizens because the interconnectors are already bought (and continue to be paid for).An LNG terminal in itself would not provide any security of supply. A floating one even less so.

Anyway what are we talking about an LNG terminal for? We were talking about storage capacity which Eamon Ryan appears to agree is required.

The world's first floating offshore wind farm just celebrated its 5th birthday.

This article goes over some of the learnings and findings

https://electrek.co/2022/12/29/worlds-first-floating-offshore-wind-farm-turns-5/

Excuse the Daily Express link but other sources for the story are pay walled.

France is in trouble with its nuke plants again. This time they are shutting down 7 to conserve fuel for when the weather gets colder.

https://www.express.co.uk/news/science/1715171/edf-macron-france-balckouts-nuclear-energy-reactors

Capt'n Midnight

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/120049282#Comment_120049282

You do know that only 4% of people are on smart plan because the retail electrical companies are taking the absolute píss.

Meanwhile in the UK some customers are being paid not to use power st times of exceptional demand.

The UK is still hoping SMR's will work but no sign of anything being built yet..... lots of talk of plans though

https://interestingengineering.com/innovation/uk-fleet-small-nuclear-reactors

Capt'n Midnight

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/120052182#Comment_120052182

Peak nuclear over the last two months was 41.5GW, now down to 24.8GW . More importantly 46% of power is coming from other sources.

Renewables hit 36%. Biomass 2%, solar 6% , hydro 11% and wind 27%. Apart from hydro it's all been installed very recently vs France hasn't added a nuclear plant in over 30 years.

France this summer (S is week number) Shows clearly how forecast-able solar backed by dispatchable hydro are use at times of peak daily demand. Note too use of imports over1 interconnectors when there's no wind. Of course solar doesn't produce as much in winter but it's cheap and low maintenance.

Capt'n Midnight

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/120052215#Comment_120052215

Construction on the first unit is expected to begin in 2028, and by the year 2050, the company aims to have 32 SMR units operational, totaling 5.1 GW of capacity. - too little too late and besides its vapourware.

From Admiral Rickover's June 5, 1953 ‘paper reactor’ memo. SMR's, thorium breeders, molten salt etc. fall into the first category. The delayed, over budget and/or cancelled Westinghouse and EDF reactors fall into the second along with the companies that went bankrupt trying.

An academic reactor or reactor plant almost always has the following basic characteristics:

1. It is simple.
2. It is small.
3. It is cheap.
4. It is light.
5. It can be built very quickly.
6. It is very flexible in purpose (“omnibus reactor”)
7. Very little development is required. It will use mostly “off-the-shelf” components.
8. The reactor is in the study phase. It is not being built now.

On the other hand, a practical reactor plant can be distinguished by the following characteristics:

1. It is being built now.
2. It is behind schedule.
3. It is requiring an immense amount of development an apparently trivial items. Corrosion, in particular, is a problem.
4. It is very expensive.
5. It takes a long time to build because of the engineering development problems.
6. It is large.
7. It is heavy.
8. It is complicated.

mcsean2163

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/120051249#Comment_120051249

??

https://www.energy.gov/ne/articles/nuclear-power-most-reliable-energy-source-and-its-not-even-close

As you can see, nuclear energy has by far the highest capacity factor of any other energy source. This basically means nuclear power plants are producing maximum power more than 92% of the time during the year.

That’s about nearly 2 times more as natural gas and coal units, and almost 3 times or more reliable than wind and solar plants.

Capt'n Midnight

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/120052371#Comment_120052371

The actual worldwide capacity factor in 2021 was 77%.

The 92% figure comes from the USA and refers to reactors of average age 41 years with a massive survivor bias. It doesn't include the constructions abandoned or delayed or reactors shut done early or converted to natural gas.

The only reactors completed in the USA in the last 30 years were started in the 1970's. Since 1990 the USA has started four new reactors. But Westinghouse went bankrupt in 2017 which meant two of the four reactors they were building were cancelled at a cost of $9Bn, the other two were taken on by the customer and $30Bn later still haven't been completed.

If you look at my posts you'll see lots of hard evidence that nuclear is unreliable. Late and overbudget are the norm. The uptimes are good, but the downtimes are horrid. 10% of nuclear plants worldwide have not produced power for 10 years or longer. That's a lot of expensive fossil fuel keeping the lights on.

Furze99

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/120051332#Comment_120051332

Children and humankind generally have survived quite well in previous centuries without access to endless cheap energy.

In fact, it might even be better for the health - both physical & mental if children needed to walk & cycle more to get about rather than relying on the family taxi. That's how we grew up a few decades ago - you wanna go somewhere, meet friends, go to a match? On yer bike.

antoinolachtnai

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/120052371#Comment_120052371

That is not even what capacity factor means.

Capacity factor is not a measure of reliability, dispatchability or anything else relevant. No one believes it is a measure of reliability, except you.

tom1ie

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/120051280#Comment_120051280

I’ll come back to you on the third pipeline question later, but how can ER be for an onshore storage facility?

You can’t store NG onshore as you have to lower the temp of NG to get it stored in metal tanks in the form of LNG- unless there’s an onshore underground site your talking about that ER is in favour of using?

antoinolachtnai

yes there are onshore options being assessed which require ‘slow’ liquefaction, that is correct.

and the other options are as you say at sea but not necessarily LNG.

I believe there are some potentially suitable sites for storage onshore but they aren’t proposing them because of the relatively short timeframe.

I think the onshore option has a fair chance. But all the options are bad in that they won’t really be deliverable this side of Christmas 2027.

mcsean2163

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/120052502#Comment_120052502

It's a direct quote from the website of the Office of Nuclear Energy in the USA. Why attack me?

Pa ElGrande

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/120051465#Comment_120051465

Carbon dioxide is not the climate control knob. Alarmists cannot tell one cycle from another, instead resorting to computer models that have no demonstrated skill in prediction, and reduced to ambulance chasing weather events.

In the next week or so, as the media rolls back to the office from holiday, there will be a flood of press releases about warmest year ever recorded in Ireland, using Met Eireann to support their narrative. Ask yourself what the Y-axis is showing and ask what exactly are they showing you? Ask them to explain what Hadcrut5 is (why it is warmer than Hadcrut4), how it is compiled and where it is used?

What is not in dispute is that less people die globally due to weather related events compared to the early 20th century, even though the global population has grown substantially since then, alarmism is not supported by empirical data. In Ireland more people die in cold weather (excess Winter deaths).

You will hear advertisements for Concern on the radio, attributing the current famine in Somalia to climate change. The climate has not changed in the region. Failed rains are not the only problem, Covid lockdowns have had a role disrupting food distribution in a politically unstable region, Undoubtedly the fact that La Nina is now in its third year has exacerbated the drought, but population growth, a ten-fold increase since 1950, is the main reason why droughts like these, which are perfectly natural and common events, now have such a human impact. The long running civil war, of course, has hardly helped matters either.

Famine stops at the Somali border. I assure you this is not a political manipulation of the data – it is the data we have. Basically, the people without a functional state and collapsing markets are being hit much harder than their counterparts in Ethiopia and Kenya, even though everyone is affected by the same bad rains, and the livelihoods of those in Somalia are not all that different than those across the borders in Ethiopia and Kenya. Rainfall is not the controlling variable for this differential outcome, because rainfall is not really variable across these borders where Ethiopia, Kenya and Somalia meet. source

Note: The World Bank data is incomplete, particularly in the early years, where some regional data is estimated. And, of course, country averages may cover up the areas suffering most.

antoinolachtnai

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/120052635#Comment_120052635

I did not realise that. I am not attacking you. But that is still not what those words mean. If a nuke runs at 90 percent capacity and a gas plant runs at 60 that doesn’t mean that one is more reliable than another, any more than a bus that is on the road 9 hours a day can be said to be more reliable than a family car that is on the road for an hour a day. The figures just reflect the different economic roles that the plants/vehicles play in the operation of the overall system.

Pa ElGrande

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/120052215#Comment_120052215

Big Tech Insiders Pushing Modular NUCLEAR Reactors for Data Centers

In a recent report, Omdia analysts Alan Howard and Vladimir Galabov made the case that using small modular reactors (SMRs) to power large datacenters might not be as crazy as it sounds.

As the name suggests, SMRs are essentially just miniaturized reactors. Instead of a massive facility producing gigawatts or more of power, SMRs are designed to produce just a fraction of that. The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) says that depending on the SMR in question, the reactors can produce anywhere from tens to hundreds of megawatts of electrical output.

These reactors are by no means a new concept. In fact, they've been powering US Navy vessels for the better part of a century without incident. The first was the USS Nautilus in 1955. Since then, nuclear power has been a mainstay of US Navy propulsion, and today, the US operates a fleet of 83 nuclear-powered ships.

However, it's only been more recently that nuclear startups have begun developing and, in some cases, deploying SMRs in a commercial setting. For instance, two Russian-built SMRs capable of 35MW each are at the heart of a floating power plant off the nation's Arctic coast.

Now whether the R&D cost needed to build 35MW can be recouped is another question. Obviously if wind and solar were capable of supplying round the clock power, then the idea of SMRs would not be worth investigating.

Akrasia

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/120052637#Comment_120052637

Anti science. Yeah every reputable scientific body on the planet recognises the need to act urgently to tackle climate change

antoinolachtnai

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/120052678#Comment_120052678

Now we get down to the core of your argument. You don’t believe in climate change. Now we understand where you are coming from. It isn’t anything to do with wind farms or LNG terminals.

thinkabouit

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/120051246#Comment_120051246

Have you watched the video I sent in about desertification of the worlds lands?

JRant

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/120052463#Comment_120052463

It is staggering how bad a take this is. Over this past couple of decades billions of people have been lifted out of abject poverty and clean reliable energy has been one of the main driving for es behind it. Something as simple as having a clean fuel source to cook on has saved countless lives as they not longer have to use smokey fuels, with natural gas bottles being the main source. UNICEF and The WHO have both done extensive studies to show that the quality of life improves immeasurably for the poorest people on the planet once they get access to cheap reliable energy.

Larbre34

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/120051262#Comment_120051262

Yes. Yes. Yes. Maybe. Yes.

Pa ElGrande

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/120052843#Comment_120052843

Of course, I don't believe in climate change. Belief is a term more often used in the context of religion and therein lies your problem. Science isn’t about "belief". It’s about facts, evidence, theories, experiments. You would not say "I believe in nuclear physics". You understand its laws and the evidence for them, or you don’t.

If you are going to come at me and others, you could say "I understand the science" on this particular issue and you're wrong, partly wrong about some parts, partly right about others, totally correct on others and you have the basis for constructive criticism or debate. You are trapped by your own beliefs where anyone who disagrees with you whatever the merits of their argument are labelled as "them" and shouted down.

Secondly, knowledge of the shortcomings of unreliable energy generation, does not confer knowledge of climate change. Groups who believe the solution to maintaining a static climate under human control is to deploy enough wind turbines and solar panels, are clearly a religious mob trying to throw a sacrifice in a volcano.

Pa ElGrande

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/120052814#Comment_120052814

No. In the context you use it, reputable scientific body means those groups who accord with the politics of climate change.

Judith Curry: The faux urgency of the climate crisis is giving us no time or space to build a secure energy future.