"Green" policies are destroying this country

machiavellianme

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/121495297#Comment_121495297

It may have lower production costs, that's correct, but it is not low cost. Because of Marginal pricing, wind can be paid the same amount as energy generated using gas, coal or oil. The price it is paid is not reflective of the cost of generation.

It's not exactly Bang for buck.

duck.duck.go

https://www.euractiv.com/section/energy-environment/news/european-heat-pump-sales-are-collapsing/

oh dear

ps200306

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/121493261#Comment_121493261

You realise that Eirgrid's plan for our future grid to support renewables includes between 1.2GW and 3.2GW of interconnectors. So we can do it for renewables but not for nuclear?

ps200306

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/121494599#Comment_121494599

70GW x 40% capacity = 28GW equivalent continuous generation. Some satisfies current demand, the rest gets converted and stored to power later generation at some horrificly bad round-trip efficiency (e.g. best case 21% efficiency for renewable power to ammonia and back). Maybe 70GW is a bit high, but doesn't sound ludicrously farfetched to me.

Anyway, didn't you say we could export the ammonia if we have too much? ...

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/121494588#Comment_121494588

Ireland can export our surplus electricity via interconnectors, and/or by creating Ammonia from hydrogen, which can be used either as a fuel for emergency backup, or exported as a raw material for fertilisers, which will be increasingly valuable as oil and gas exploration winds down

So we're going to triple the cost of fertiliser as well as electricity? I can't be the only person outraged by the proposal of this massive experiment with the world's food supply? My main consolation is that Ireland hasn't a snowball's chance in hell of implementing these crackpot ideas and, even if it did, poor countries will not buy "green Irish fertiliser" at three times the price of the conventional stuff.

ps200306

A couple of link dumps from a physicist that I agree with. They're about policy, not physics.

https://twitter.com/skdh/status/1731913050108682357

Yes, our climate targets will fail because plans to meet them are mostly empty words. They are slightly slowing down the developments though, so still better than nothing. Of course we should keep on trying, and of course activists will keep on insisting the impossible is possible and then complain that no one is listening to them.

The reason all this climate talk goes nowhere is that most climate activists misidentify the source of the problem. It's not a technological problem -- we have known how to avoid climate change since we've learned of it. The problem is that we have no system to convert this knowledge into collective action.

The only global system that we have to aggregate information and coordinate actions to use resources are free market economies. And for those to work, we'd have had to put a price on carbon dioxide emissions. Which we did not.

So for several decades now we have witnessed meetings and demonstrations and countless opinion pieces that amounted to very little.

It is not hard to predict what is going to happen from here on because the default mode of humans is simply to keep on doing what they've been doing.

This is why Carbon Capture and Storage and Carbon Dioxide Removal (eg BECCS) will become increasingly widespread -- because they'll allow nations too keep on doing what they're doing.

I see in my mentions that some people insist I must be dumb for not understanding that CCS and CDR are costly, ineffective, and unlikely to scale.

Well, yes, I am so dumb that I said this in a video two years ago. I am not saying it's a good solution. I'm simply saying it's how it will go because it's the closest we can manage to a market for carbon. And fossil fuel companies know this full well.

And since that is very unlikely to keep global warming below 3 degrees, we'll end up doing stratospheric aerosol injections. Again, a stupid thing to do. I'm not saying we should do it. I am merely saying this is what I think will happen. Why? Because it's cheap and we know how to do it and the more we think about it, the more appealing it will look.

If you want to know what I think we should do, well, I've said this before. Expand solar, wind and most importantly nuclear, CCS on fossil fuel plants, upgrade the electric grids, and stop wasting money on nonsense, like for example those COP meetings...

https://twitter.com/skdh/status/1734801507885740113

Everyone who thinks the world could just stop using fossil fuels on the snap of a finger should have a look at this chart. More than 80% of the world's energy supply presently comes from oil, gas, and coal, and that number has barely changed in the past decade.

Of course we will eventually phase out fossil fuels, simply because the supply is finite. No matter how hard you dig, there's only so much of the stuff.

But at present, the life of pretty much everyone on this planet depends in one way or another on fossil fuels. In case you live in a fancy new "zero emissions" house, well, first of all congrats on being in the 0.001% of the world population who can afford that, and second, try to figure out how many of the supply chains for building that house would break down without fossil fuels.

If we were to put a price on carbon dioxide emissions tomorrow without also subsidizing fossil fuels, much of the world economy would collapse because most of the key industries would go bankrupt basically overnight. (I think we should still put a price on carbon because it's the right default, but then we'll need to find a way to ease the transition.)

This is why it's become so hard to solve this problem. It would have been easy enough 50 years ago to put a price on carbon dioxide, switch to nuclear, and with further improvements in solar to more of that. But we've missed that bus.

I want to emphasize again because people keep misunderstanding this, I am not a fan of fossil fuels. If it were up to me, I'd plaster the world with nuclear power plants tomorrow and would take great pleasure in seeing oil companies falter and die. I am merely saying this is a difficult problem to solve, and the reason it's difficult is not technological, it's mostly economical.

That said, let me stress again that I think the extensions of the electric grid necessary to support the transition to renewables are an underappreciated problem. Without the grid, nothing else is going to work.

duck.duck.go

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/121497263#Comment_121497263

He claimed earlier (in a very snarky manner implying my college education is rubbish) in this thread that nuclear produced electricity can not traverse an interconnector

That’s the standard of debate here 🧐

antoinolachtnai

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/121496798#Comment_121496798

By ‘small amount’ you mean ‘1.5 gigawatts nominal’ with another 900 MW on the way?

There is also interconnection with Norway.

I am surprised they did not tell you about the Synchronous Grid of Northern Europe when you were there?

antoinolachtnai

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/121497767#Comment_121497767

i don’t know anything about your college education. In theory you can put any sort of electricity down a DC interconnector, as you no doubt learned as part of your college education. The operational reality is very different. DC circuits have significant downtime and cannot be overloaded even for short periods. So they don’t provide the same sort of safety margin for a 1.4GW nuclear unit that an AC interconnector does. I suppose you could do it in theory but any time any of the DC interconnection is down, nuclear stations will have to be wound down or shut down too. You’d also have limited flexibility in interconnector operations because even when available its use for import whilst the nuclear station was running would be limited. None of this applies to gas or wind, which is composed of small units which can fail without massively impacting the whole system.

You could solve this by building lots of extra DC interconnection but it would be really really expensive. It doesn’t make much economic sense to build DC capacity to be used as backup only.

duck.duck.go

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/121498584#Comment_121498584

Jesus, instead of walking away you have just doubled down on nonsense that defies physics and engineering

While ignoring that we are gonna endup with north of 50GW of unreliable wind (onshore and offshore) and solar by 2050, that can vary from zero to 50 and back in space of a day, for which there isn’t the demand in this country

Akrasia

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/121496840#Comment_121496840

You're conflating the EU energy policy with the techology

I think it would be pretty dumb to plan the energy infrastructure over the next century based on an EU energy pricing policy that is open to change at any time

Akrasia

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/121496899#Comment_121496899

Signal vs Noise

Was the increased in sales last year a reaction to the massive spike in energy costs, in which case those were supernormal sales, and a 14% fall is 'regression towards the mean' rather than a 'collapse' in sales as reported in that article

machiavellianme

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/121498519#Comment_121498519

It's very weakly connected (hvdc doesn't improve system strength) with regular NTC reductions. The 3 AC interconnectors with Norway/Sweden are in the north and support the local voltages in the arctic circle more than bulk powerflows. It's analogous to the light interconnection between Ireland and Northern Ireland such as the Enniskillen or Strabane PST tielines where flows are mainly for support during outages, and not at all comparable to the likes of CE interconnection such as France and Germany etc. A fault in Finland will not see any electromagnetic response from a generator deep in the CE system. Unless things have changed dramatically since I was there for the commissioning of Estlink1 (I doubt it has since estlink2 is also asynchronous) the Finnish grid is not a classic example of a robust one,especially post the Russian invasion of Ukraine.

There is no "synchronous grid of Northern Europe", Entso-E classifies the systems as "Continental Europe, Nordic, Baltic, UK, Ireland and Northern Ireland" because they are all separate grids. Finland is part of the Nordic system which only includes it, Sweden, Norway and Zealand (Denmark). It connects via hvdc elsewhere.

antoinolachtnai

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/121498794#Comment_121498794

Correct. Sweden, Norway, Finland and Zealand is a massive grid, compared to Ireland. How much bigger would you say? 12 times bigger say?

Correct. Support during outages is exactly what you need when you have big nuclear units (which may suddenly trip) on your grid.

machiavellianme

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/121498992#Comment_121498992

Large offshore wind farms may also suddenly trip. As can interconnectors. That's why we plan for the loss of largest infeed (currently 500MW but increasing to 700MW when Celtic goes live). There are nuclear reactors at 650MW so your concern is moot. Generally nuclear plants have higher reliability once commissioned and don't trip regularly based on Entso-E data. I'd be more worried about cable faults for wind or converter faults for interconnectors.

antoinolachtnai

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/121499443#Comment_121499443

you can build a nuclear plant of any size if you want. The problem is that the economics an aren’t great for smaller plants. A 650 MW nuclear reactor is not going to have the economic benefits that have been breathlessly narrated in this thread. That’s why Poland and The Emiratis don’t build at that scale. If you look at the list of nuclear plants under construction there aren’t many under 1000 MW for the same reason.

There is also no nuclear plant in construction on any island smaller than Britain as far as I know.

machiavellianme

Nor is there 37GW of wind under planning/construction on any island smaller than Britain.

Also, Taiwan says hi. Not only is it smaller than Britain but it's half the size of Ireland.

antoinolachtnai

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/121499706#Comment_121499706

Very interesting observation. Thank you.

Thank you for your observations about Taiwan. No nuclear under construction or planned there, is there?

Edit: Taiwan is actually planning 40 GW of wind for 2040 from what I understand.

roosterman71

Don't know if this tech is the same as CCS (carbon capture and storage), then it really is just a fantasy to be expecting it to do anything meaningful

https://thebulletin.org/2023/12/direct-air-capture-an-expensive-dangerous-distraction-from-real-climate-solutions/

Oxy estimates that the project will separate 500,000 tons of carbon dioxide per year and cost about $1 billion to build. Adding in operations and maintenance, we, and others, estimate the total costs will be more than $500 per ton of avoided carbon dioxide.

It is easy to see that $500 per ton is extremely expensive; it implies $6 per gallon to clean up the carbon dioxide put in the atmosphere from burning gasoline. Dealing with all US emissions would cost about $3 trillion per year, every year—about 4 times what we spend on the entire US military—and would require building both air-handling capacity larger than the combined capacity of every HVAC system in the entire country as well as new power plants (all from carbon-free sources!) equal to twice the total power generation capacity of the US today. If this is what’s required to avoid climate change, we’re in big trouble.

PommieBast

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/121500544#Comment_121500544

Suppose it is a form of CCS, but CCS normally implies capturing the CO2 at the same place it is burned. My first reaction was to check whether the article was datestamped for 1st April.

machiavellianme

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/121500544#Comment_121500544

Wouldn't it be easier to plant circa 2.5 million trees? You'd get the same impact for a lot less cost. Heck, better again, stop burning down rainforests and use sustainable farming in sensible climates. That'd cost nothing.

charlie14

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/121494599#Comment_121494599

If you were not so scared of even attempting to understand the costs required for this offshore hydrogen plan it is simple enough.

The original 30 GW offshore plan was to provide half of the generation for consumers, half for hydrogen. 30GW x 40% of offshore capacity = 12 GW, 6GW for our peak demand back then and 6 GW for hydrogen generation. That plan has now been upgraded because of our peak demand increasing since to 37GW offshore 37GW x 40% = 14.8 GW. 7.4GW for peak demand, 7.4GW for hydrogen.

If our peak consumption is to increase to 14 GW then hydrogen will again require the same, 14GW. A total generation from offshore of 28 GW. That 28GW would be provided from just 40% of the offshore nameplate capacity, so the total installed offshore nameplate capacity required would be 28 divided by 40 multiplied by 100. 70 GW.

It not ludicrous. It`s simple mathematics. What is ludicrous is the costs that would be required. But then you are just going to run away from that yet again.

charlie14

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/121493777#Comment_121493777

Those owners of offshore wind farms are not building them just for the fun of it. They are building them as a business enterprise to make a profit on their investment, so all the up front investment and the profit margin is going to be paid by us.

Unlike some greenies who believe that Hinkley nuclear was a dreadful deal, to you it must look like the deal of the century. The Hinkley price allowing for inflation May this year was £125/MWh (€145). THe Codling wind farm price same date €89.92/MWh. For the "us" that doubles to €180/MWh as nobody is going to be paying for the 50% generated for hydrogen other than us, and with Eamon Ryan`s guarantee, that is the price we will pay for every WM they generate even if we do not need or use it.

But it doesn`t end there. We will also be paying for all and everything concerned with hydrogen on top. End of the day we would be paying ~50% more than the Hinkley price, and that is before the 28% of the much more expensive floating turbines are included.

patnor1011

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/121507962#Comment_121507962

Not only that, from what I understand that "guaranteed wholesale price" will have to be paid for everything they produce, no matter if we need it, use it, or not.

roosterman71

Do we pay even if they don't produce (when wind isn't blowing?) or is tat something I imagined?

ednwireland

solar grant down by 300, ev charger grant down 50 %. must have all that green stuff sorted then.

roosterman71

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/121509514#Comment_121509514

https://twitter.com/evbnb_ie/status/1735340815491166339

Government aren't funding it as much, but still want the changes made. We're moving from carrot to stick

antoinolachtnai

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/121507962#Comment_121507962

Could you run us through the details of how demand from hydrogen electrolysis would double the practical price paid by the punters? All other things being equal, extra demand in the off peak will drive down the subsidy paid. All other things being equal, hydrogen will also mean that a smaller amount of price-supported wind would be required.

Both of the points below apply equally to solar, wind and nuclear.

be great to see your detailed modeling explaining this.

roosterman71

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/121511496#Comment_121511496

Curious too but I suspect that power used by punters that's generated from wind will be paid for, but twice as much power is being generated than what the punters use and that extra is to be funneled for some hydrogen related shenanigans. That power is also to be paid for, but the end user isn't the one directly paying for it.

So we generated 10GW lets say for wind. 5GW of that goes to consumers and to power the country. Consumer buys that at the agreed price from the auctions. But there's another 5GW also generated that too is paid for at the agreed rate. Users will end up paying for that too.

Or something like that

patnor1011

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/121511496#Comment_121511496

It is quite simple. We will have to pay for wind generated power whether we use it or not. "Excess" power which will have to be paid for will be used to create hydrogen but that process will not be free and will have to be paid too. That will have to be stored (on our expense again) to be used when needed - energy created will not be free but paid for by us again.

It does not matter how much of "price-supported wind" is required as we will have to pay for it even if we will not need it. What is being proposed here as a great way to store energy produced only to be used when needed is ultimately the opposite as we will have to pay for every step involved essentially doubling the price (if not even more than doubling).