Energy infrastructure

Well Spain is the opposite - they actually charged any solar users extra - for reducing the profits of the main electricity company - Ireland is a bit late to the party on offshore wind ( well off the east coast anyway ) , the German idea to shut down their built nuclear plants prematurely was not very bright to say the least .. although their wind and solar is helping reduce their gas use , ( again most gas in Germany is used in industry and domestic heating )

The problem of storage is similar in a way to the problem of small nuclear reactors. The technological concepts like electrolysis and liquefaction or compression for storage are well understood and have been implemented in specialised settings for years.

the problem is how to develop and grow them to the scale of the grid.

I'd argue that gas storage of some kind is probably the most urgently needed item of energy infrastructure in Ireland ...

And vast quantities of offshore wind ,

Story on Al Jaazera this evening about the EU now looking to Africa for its long term gas supplies - maybe reality is dawning at last>>?? Also SSE also hiking its power prices despite claiming to supply its customers with "100%" green energy. How they are constantly allowed to get away with this BS by the ASA continues to baffle!!😡

These are large infrastructure projects that can't be rolled out in a matter of weeks just because the nutjob in the Kremlin invaded Ukraine a month ago.

Even the gas-fired stations that were successful in the recent tender won't be completed until 2024/25.

"Solar is a possibility for PV generation by rooftop arrays - but winter and cloud cover rob us of quite a bit of the gains. If the panels are cheap, it is certainly an addition. However, we are too far north for it to be a major contributor."

I agree with much of the rest of what you're saying but I think there's a blind spot in Ireland with respect to grid-scale PV. It's coming and it's going to be a huge component of the decarbonisation of electricity generation regardless of latitude. This article - https://renewablesnow.com/news/eu-solar-installs-beat-record-in-2021-and-growth-continues-767619/ - gives an indication of the growth curve we're talking about. The Danes, the Dutch, the Germans, for example are all investing heavily and are installing plants at comparable latitudes. In fact the Dutch have more solar PV capacity per-capita than any other country in Europe despite being similarly handicapped in terms of geography.

It's down to simple numbers - even at a lowish capacity factor of 10% (at Irish latitudes) solar PV is still more than viable and can easily compete because the panel prices are so cheap. And they are getting cheaper.

It's not easy to appreciate how combining two largely un-correlated sources like wind and solar results in such big drop in the overall variance of output. But the effect is well understood in finance (e.g. there was a Nobel prize awarded for CAPM) - the reduction in variance is much greater than most would guess.

The other big advantage of grid scale solar PV is that combining it with BESS (also on a huge growth curve due to price falls) allows you to effectively eliminate the hourly variance/daily cycle of PV output and deliver the electricity when it's most in demand.

Its interesting that the government is still refusing to roll out a grid supplying micro generation RESS for rooftop and farm solar - I guess the government is still wedded to the developer led model that sees all the RESS money going to the usual suspects ie. large wind developers with not even crumbs for anyone else!!

What's the connection between EVs and wind turbines?

The bit that makes it economical.

Yeah it’s great, until the wind drops.

Then we are back to needing gas.

We are pissing against the wind (pardon the pun 😬) until we build a **** load of offshore turbines to give us peak demand plus excess %

and

some way of storing that excess %, which no other national grid in the world has in place yet.

It’s a massive challenge.

No argument wind currently dominates the renewables space. But there have been some shifts in momentum. The advantages of wind are fairly clear but I think solar has some distinct advantages like flexible scaling and the fact that it marries so well with li-ion battery storage.

The most common and most economical batteries generally have a 4 to 1 energy capacity to power ratio and this suits solar PV to a tee by eliminating the intra-day variability. The variability of wind is no sot easily tamed - as a stand-alone power source it would need something like hydrogen which for me has yet to prove itself at scale and faces significant technical challenges yet. Not that we don't have other ways of dealing with the variability.

Meanwhile the production of li-ion batteries and variants is growing exponentially and the prices are continuing to fall so complementing cheap solar panels with batteries is guaranteed to become a thing.

Another thing to keep in mind is that solar PV still has massive room for improvement in terms of efficiency (e.g. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tQmFVcD-Mbo&t=1s ) while wind turbines are already approaching full efficiency in terms of extracting energy from the wind for a given size of turbine. We've bypassed this issue somewhat by building bigger and bigger turbines but these turbines are far less flexible in terms of finding suitable site - off-shore is really the only viable option here and off-shore is currently somewhat expensive so the efficiency gains by going large are currently more than offset by the increased installation and maintenance costs of siting them in the sea.

I believe wind will continue to dominate for a decade maybe but think solar will win in the end - it's silicon based after all and nothing mechanical can keep up with advances in solid state stuff - especially partnered with li-ion batteries.