2020 officially saw a record number of $1 billion weather and climate disasters.

The solution is a mixture of local grid level backups and continent level interconnection. When energy is over abundant there will be a market for some suppliers to stockpile it and sell it in times of scarcity

its no different to any other economic commodity instead of having massive tankers Or reservoirs full of oil, the energy will be stored in thermal plants or batteries or as chemical or potential energy

as long as it’s well regulated we’ll figure out a mix of long term solutions. There are so many viable solutions to this problem, the question is really about which mix we go with rather than ‘can it be done’

They haven't managed it in the likes of Germany so repeating the same experiment here with the likes of Eamon Ryan directing policy is unlikely to end well

Look, you seem to be joining in just for the sake of it, not even reading back in the conversation, moving the goalposts as you go. Where did I say that recent decades have not been the warmest? You made that up too.

Just to fill you in, we've been discussing energy in Ireland and Akrasia made up a "fact" that storms here have been getting stronger when in fact the opposite is true, and was shown several times to be so. He and now you are trying to deflect from that with a different angle.

That's just not correct I'm afraid. Wind and it's unpredictability is the main issue, could with our government being overeager in shutting down fossil fuel plants. It's also responsible for driving up energy prices.

Many data centers are already involved in peak shaving which has been used quite a lot this year as the wind just didn't blow. Many of these data centers have diesel generator backups which allows for this. However, newer many data centers have pivitoed to very short term energy storage devices for backup as the current legislation only allows 4 hours of runtime on gens. So in a move to reduce emissions from these generators we've taken away their ability to provide this peak shaviy capability.

As a matter of interest, outside of Diesel generators, what type of energy storage are available to supply a 20MW site with power for 48hours?

Akrasia says I can't "dismiss reports based on historical measurements" by doing what I and others did...i.e.using historical measurements. He prefers to cherrypick anecdotal recollections of local events in the past few years, with absolutely zero data as backup. He also includes the 2009 floods, nothing to do with wind, to try to paper over his cracks, as if those floods came from one of these single storms he thinks are getting stronger. I'd like to see data to confirm that "half of his county"was under water. I don't think we'll be seeing them any time soon.

He also thinks it's reasonable for people to get there homes to an A rating with passive systems and heat pumps. He's living in cloud cuckoo land.

Like any of these "green" iniatives they forget the most important part. You need to build the infrastructure first before crippling people with carbon taxes when they have no viable alternatives available.

There was another of these types on Virgin last night talking about EVs exporting back to the grid during peak times. Sure sounds great until you think about it for half a second. Those peak times are usually when people are commuting.

"Eamonn is a plant for big oil, he must be". - Nabber

Well, he must be getting his millions from somewhere.

Please post evidence to back up your accusation there BR, otherwise back tf up. I have a right to clarify his mistake, to which he afterwards owned up himself.

Unfortunately your user profile is private, so I can't access the Ignore button. I'll just have to do it manually from now on.

Yeah, sorry, I had MB on the brain when I was typing that, should have said MW

I fully agree that industry should be required to generate some of their own power, especially if they have lots of space on their roofs that could be utilised for solar at very little cost to themselves and with this usually comes some battery installations. There are even companies that operate to install and maintain these installations on premises at no cost to the company, and they sell the power back to the company at a cheaper rate than they can buy from the grid.

The greens should use their position in government to make these mandatory, and to require the grid to allow excess energy to be sold back to the grid

We need to be thinking long term here, the existing operators do not want microgenerators to be able to sell back to the grid, because this would undercut their prices at a time of surplus supply, but if we had a system where during peak times, electricity prices fall to extremely low levels, even given away for free, this would make it economical for operators to come in to buy this surplus energy and store it through the multitude of ways, (compressed air, gravity storage, chemical batteries (of all kinds of different chemistries with different use cases), thermal storage, even storage inside the fleet of electric vehicles, or industrial processes switching their energy intensive activities to who can be configured perform energy intense tasks when the price is lowest.

As well as this, Ireland has the capacity for about 5GW of energy from large scale offshore floating wind installations off our southwest coast which is planned to come on board by 2030, and a further 25GW of energy in our deeper more exposed waters. We should be aiming at over producing energy which we can then sell to Europe to assist them in their carbon neutrality targets or use to convert

Ireland's peak demand last year was

so the additional 5GW of offshore wind would almost cover the entire energy needs to the country most of the time, meaning that we will be overproducing electricity for much of the year. Currently a lot of that is wasted, or we deliberately turn off infrastructure, we need to be incentivising the use of this excess energy when the prices are low so we can have lower peak demand when supply is low and also storage and interconnectors

With Gas and Coal turbines, keeping them running when prices are low is uneconomical, so the plants are shut down, with renewables, the marginal cost of producing each unit of energy is very low so a renewable infrastructure allows these new storage technologies to become viable.

The 30 minutes of Peak demand figure is assuming a catastrophic failure of every other power station at once, which if it does happen, means they have bigger problems than running out of electricity

but even if 30 mins was the max useful capacity of these BESS plants, the point of them, is to provide instant backup to allow other systems to kick into gear. There are lots of other storage solutions that can be brought online with a bit of a lead in time and can be used for longer grid backup

Japan recording record low September temps.

So notable in its rarity that you felt the need to post it here