Energy infrastructure

cnocbui · 17-01-2022 8:07pm

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/118490939#Comment_118490939

I get the idea, but the costs and economics are a complete unknown, meaning currently announced projects clearly dont have it in mind.

bk · 17-01-2022 9:06pm

"I get the idea, but the costs and economics are a complete unknown, meaning currently announced projects clearly dont have it in mind."

Or you can just sell the excess over interconnectors, as the Scottish are doing very successfully.

As an aside, green hydrogen production or other storage options aren't needed to hit our 2030 goal. We can do that with gas plants.

It is the 2050 goal that we will need to look to green hydrogen, etc. It is likely be after 2030 that we will seriously start hearing more about that. Before then we have two RESS auctions and lots of new wind to build to get too our 2030 goal.

Sam Russell · 17-01-2022 10:15pm

Of course geo-thermal will be coming on stream in the next decade or so. Hopefully it will work for us.

Drill a hole deep into the earth to depth that gets to the quite hot bit, and feed cold water down and get hot water back. Sounds simple which I am sure is not the case. Iceland has the system working, but they also have volcanoes.

gjim · 17-01-2022 11:07pm

I think it can be misleading to look at current electricity consumption when thinking about what do with future "excess" electricity.

We're living through two energy revolutions - the first the the de-carbonization of electricity generation and the second is the electrification of non-electricity based energy.

In 2020, only 20% of the energy consumed in Ireland was in the form of electricity. This share will expand fairly rapidly in the next few decades.

For example, in the short/medium term, the EV revolution will create a significant demand for "excess" electricity.

In the longer term, the electrification of various industrial processes, domestic heating/cooking and general transport will continuously create new demand for electricity.

Capt'n Midnight · 18-01-2022 12:38am

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/118491756#Comment_118491756

Just a matter of depth. The north of our island has decent temperatures closer to the surface. Outside volcanic areas geothermal isn't quite renewable because you harvest heat from say a cube 1Km on each side for a while and then drill more well sand move on to the next one. But there's lots of rocks underground so it would take a long time to use up all the heat.

It's similar to fracking in that you have to create a myriad of little cracks around the wells. Pump cold water down one side and it flows through the cracks in the hot rocks to be harvested on the other side.

18-01-2022 12:43am

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/118492437#Comment_118492437

Pump cold water down one side and it flows through the cracks in the hot rocks to be harvested on the other side.

I always thought it was pipes in and out, a closed loop. Haven't dug into large scale geothermal though so I could very well be wrong

Capt'n Midnight · 18-01-2022 1:18am

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/118492466#Comment_118492466

Closed loop probably won't work for grid level power here https://www.seai.ie/technologies/seai-maps/geothermal-maps/

Capt'n Midnight · 18-01-2022 1:23am

Temp at 2.5Km deep

Freddie Mcinerney · 18-01-2022 2:03am

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/118475547#Comment_118475547

Must be all the lignite Pand burn.

Banana Republic 1 · 18-01-2022 7:08am

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/118485718#Comment_118485718

“I’m not an electrician”, key phrase there.

bk · 18-01-2022 1:54pm

"“I’m not an electrician”, key phrase there."

Sure, if you aren't comfortable, you should always get an electrician to do it. But it isn't a particularly difficult DIY job. If you can wire a plug, then it is about the same difficulty.

"For example, in the short/medium term, the EV revolution will create a significant demand for "excess" electricity."

The nice thing about EV's is that mostly they can be quiet flexible about when they charge day to day. Connect them to a smart meter and have them (optionally) only charge when electricity is at it's cheapest (usually when demand is low). They can be quiet a nice way to soak up excess wind power.

Likewise, very well insulated water tanks could soak up excess wind power to generate hot water. Robert Llewellyn of Fully charged has a tank like that and has done some interesting videos on it.

bk · 18-01-2022 1:58pm

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/118492558#Comment_118492558

Would the goal be to generate power or would it be just hot water for heating/washing? And would that make a difference in the setup required and the suitability of locations?

60c is normally the target for hot water, due to Legionella bacteria forming at lower temps.

18-01-2022 3:39pm

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/118492571#Comment_118492571

This makes it look like geothermal won't be a runner as far as energy generation is concerned but would be 100% suitable for district level hot water/heating systems, would that be right?

Teasing it out, a new suburb/large estate being built could have a small GT plant somewhere in it, pulling heated water up at approx 60 degrees and providing it to all the surrounding homes and businesses. Not sure about it for retrofitting, but for new developments it would seem like a no brainer

Capt'n Midnight · 18-01-2022 3:52pm

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/118494165#Comment_118494165

District heating could already be done with waste industrial heat or even data centre heat (get water up to 40C and then top up from elsewhere) without needing to drill down. For rural areas you're looking at heat pump probably depending on survey.

Check out the https://gis.seai.ie/geothermal/ maps click layers and check your transparent settings.

For grid power you'd need hot steam. 250C ~ 22% Carnot efficiency. There's plenty of heat down at 5Km (unless you live in Munster or south east Leinster) but very expensive to get there.

Sam Russell · 18-01-2022 5:15pm

Interesting about GT.

It might get us that last 20% renewable when the wind does not blow. But that will be 2049 when that is required.

Capt'n Midnight · 18-01-2022 6:40pm

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/118495561#Comment_118495561

If there's a change in the cost of drilling or tunnelling it makes nuclear waste storage cheaper but it would aid renewables , like geothermal and pumped storage more.

The design of Finland's waste repository is for 400m depth , The repository will total a length of about 35 kilometers, with each tunnel being about 4.5 meters high, 3.5 meters wide and 350 meters long, each holding about 30 canisters. That's about 550,000m3,

If converted to pumped storage it would store 1/3rd as much energy as Turlough Hill does.

Here's a mad scheme bore big tunnels under the sea to use for pumped storage. The cost seems wildly optimistic though.

The PSH facility will have a minimum capacity of 2,180MW with a storage volume of 12m m3 ... Based on a German project, headline total construction costs have been estimated at approximately €2bn.

Sam Russell · 18-01-2022 7:02pm

Nuclear is of no interest in Ireland, so storing nuclear waste even less of an interest.

Pumped storage looks like a good solution but would need to be a much bigger scheme than Turlough Hill.

RandomViewer · 18-01-2022 11:28pm

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/118496046#Comment_118496046

I'd throw another zero on the end of that for starters, think there's a method to calculate actual cost from proposed cost, it involves some strange maths

Capt'n Midnight · 19-01-2022 2:26am

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/118496211#Comment_118496211

The more I look at nuclear the more it seems to require the same kind of extra infrastructure that would boost renewables. Backup and peaking generators, grid extensions to remote locations, repositories that overlap with pumped storage construction. When you get to French levels of nuclear on a grid you need interconnectors to export when you're producing too much power in summer.

If you have to dig out 35Km of tunnels, you could make all sorts of pumped storage solutions feasible. For larger schemes the Spirit Of Ireland and other similar plans looked at using the sea as the lower reservoir. So you only need to construct an upper one, and then you are looking at the square cube law where the volume of water stored grows faster than the dam size as you scale up. (Of the freshwater ones Mullaghcleevaun would probably use Poulaphouca reservoir as the lower reservoir)

Markcheese · 19-01-2022 9:26am

All those extras bring wind to around nuclear levels of cost ( to build ,)

But nuclear needs the extras on top of the base price ,- plus the decommissioning costs ..

There is the issue of the 20% gas as reserve to renewables , although that'll prob be there for nuclear too

bk · 19-01-2022 3:49pm

Yes, exactly if you build Nuclear, you still need pretty much all the same backups that wind needs.

So for instance lets say for the 2030 goal, we went 80% Nuclear (pretty impossible in that time line, but anyway), you'd still need all the existing Natural Gas power plants as backups + interconnectors.

For 2050 goal, you'd then need to either have excess Nuclear producing green hydrogen and/or filling storage (battery/pumped hydro/etc.) and/or enough interconnectors to fully back up the grid.

Either way pretty much the same backups that Wind need.

"All those extras bring wind to around nuclear levels of cost ( to build ,)"

Well that is the thing, the backups are much the same, if you build wind or Nuclear and thus the cost of those backups is relatively similar. But building wind is much cheaper then Nuclear.

Or too put it another way wind + backups will be much cheaper then Nuclear + backups. And that is before you add the cost to build the waste storage facilities, decommissioning costs, etc.

20-01-2022 2:39am

Germany (next year), Belgium (2025) and Spain (2030) all have firm plans for the removal of nuclear from their grids.

https://www.pv-magazine.com/2022/01/13/belgium-has-four-years-to-replace-nuclear-fleet-which-generated-39-of-its-electricity-in-2020/

20-01-2022 5:10pm

Some of the major issues in the Irish systems are highlighted here in relation to the offshore wind industry, primarily in the area of planning and coordination amongst govt agencies and departments

https://theconversation.com/ireland-has-the-wind-and-seas-to-become-an-offshore-superpower-174553

Apogee · 20-01-2022 7:27pm

The electricity consumed by data centres in Ireland went up by 144% from 2015-2020, according to figures released today by the Central Statistics Office.

Total metered electricity consumption went up by 10% over the same period.

Data centres accounted for 73% of the increase in the consumption of electricity over the period.

Data centres store and process information from computer systems and there are approximately 70 in Ireland, according to industry sources.

The percentage of total metered electricity consumption accounted for by data centres more than doubled, rising from 5% in 2015 to 11% in 2020.

https://www.rte.ie/news/business/2022/0120/1274804-cso-on-electricity-consumption/

EI-H2 were doing public consultations on their proposed hydrogen operation in Aghada just before Christmas. Presumably a planning application can't be too far away.

https://twitter.com/Public_Consult/status/1465338798448033797

Capt'n Midnight · 20-01-2022 9:06pm

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/118503929#Comment_118503929

Slovenia will be closing it's only nuclear plant in 2023 It's co-owned by Croatia.

Waste repository funds have been ring-fenced in the fund for NEK’s decommissioning.

Low- and intermediate-level waste will be stored in concrete containers. The silo will accept up to 990 containers, meaning there should be enough storage space for Slovenia’s half of all NEK waste and half of the waste from the decommissioning of the power plant, Viršek said.

Croatia has a legal obligation to dispose of the other half of the waste. But the waste will be stored at the station until 2043 so they can kick the can a bit. Or maybe not.

Bosnia and Herzegovina’s Minister of Foreign Trade and Economic Relations Staša Košarac told Croatia’s Ambassador Ivan Sabolić that the neighboring country’s intention to build a storage site for radioactive and nuclear waste from Krško less than a kilometer from the border is unacceptable.

Good thing the UK didn't build a nuclear power plant in the North then.

Markcheese · 21-01-2022 12:00am

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/118507569#Comment_118507569

I can't see them getting planning permission for a hydrogen plant here -

It's a small site , with a tennis club on one side ,the main road to the refinery next to it , and big houses over looking it ...

eire4 · 21-01-2022 9:13pm

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/118506812#Comment_118506812

Lets hope the government get their act together and set the stage regulatory wise so that we can really begin moving into offshore wind as quickly as possible. I would think the massive spike in energy prices this winter should be a real spur to get moving quickly as if the climate crisis was not enough of one already. It really is amazing in a negative way how poor our governments performance is in this area to date especially given the massive benefits to our country's energy security and economy as a whole.

24-01-2022 6:49am

A great vid from Real Engineering on the subject of carbon taxes

https://youtu.be/aznOL753eiQ

cnocbui · 24-01-2022 12:07pm

Carbon taxes impoverish consumers - that's how they are designed to work. You take away a cheap alterntaive and force adoption of an expensive one. That's why all the greenies are driving diesels instead of petrols - 2007 carbon taxes. They are predicated on government cynicism of not caring if the populace can afford the measures. Carbon taxes are just what are needed by first home buyers trying to save for a mortgage or householders trying to pay one off.

Carbon taxes are inflationary. They might revive the fortunes of unions as people realise they need a collective voice in order to secure better pay in order to make life affordable.

On the face of it, good news for lenders, even more private debt for them to profit off.

I think we will soon get to an inflection point where there will be more political capital to be gained by promissing reductions in carbon taxes. Of course this will be resisted by ever more push on climate alarmism and catastrophism, but near term financial realities will win the day at some point, I hope.

Da Cor was cheering about the government moving completely to EV's. The national debt is currently €150,000 per income tax payer. The loons in government have also agreed to PS pay rise and that mob are chanting for a restoration of pre GFC levels reined in by the Croke Park agreement. Cheering the prospect of the government taking on ever more debt or increasing taxes to buy expensive EV's is par for the course I suppose - lemmings never see the cliff.

Markcheese · 24-01-2022 12:50pm

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/118524782#Comment_118524782

I think it's going to be more a case of how much installed name plate wind capacity we're going to need ( and batteries of some type ) to get to 80% of our energy needs -.

Wind is intermittent, there's no argument there,to be meaningful it's got to be part of a system , basically the wind turbines -the grid -storage ( shorterm) and back up ( gas for the foreseeable future ) -- and that's isn't cheap. But then neither is any other system with the possible exception of gas alone - and we've pretty much accepted that's not sustainable environmentally,

I could quote x stat when wind alone supplyed y amount of power for an hour or a day or a week , but it won't mean much ... On its own ..

Energy infrastructure

Comments