Energy infrastructure

"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.

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.

Is this Electric Interconnect correct and is the EWIC not working this past 3 weeks? If it's out - that would be

significant and no wonder prices are jumping like hell.. Anybody know anything about this - Only the Moyle seems to be doing it's job since 14th March?

Have you any actual data to prove your specific claim that solar PV is not viable in Ireland? E.g. capacity factors, specific yield (kWh/kWp), seasonality metrics, degradation rates, etc?

The potential and viability of solar PV is decided by science/engineering. You can be absolutely sure that the companies and countries that are investing billions in solar have "done the math".

The numbers are easy to access - here's a per country calculation done by the World Bank - https://documents.worldbank.org/en/publication/documents-reports/documentdetail/466331592817725242/global-photovoltaic-power-potential-by-country . No question that Ireland is one of the worst countries in the world for solar but yet the kWh/kWp is only a bit under half that of the best countries in the world.

Which means that it's commercially viable at scale in Ireland with todays technology. This is proven by the RESS auctions - quoting from https://www.nsenergybusiness.com/news/ireland-provisional-results-ress-auction/

"EirGrid, which implemented the auction process for RESS 1, said that the average strike price for all projects was €74.08/MWh. For solar projects, it stands at €72.92/MWh."

So even before the arrival of newer tech and expected improvements, solar can deliver electricity in Ireland at rates (just) below the average for renewables. Surely you agree that these privately financed companies bidding for solar in the RESS auction will have done their sums? Like the Danes, Germans and Dutch (particularly not known for their financial naivity) will have done the sums before rolling out solar capacity as fast as they can.

"costing more energy than their delivering"? The idea that a factory producing panels would require more energy than generated during the expected life time makes no sense at all. The degradation rates in HOT countries (where panels degrade faster) is about 0.5% a year. This means they are still expected to operate at nearly 90% efficiency after 25 years or 60% after 100 years. Basically, unless you take a hammer to a solar panel, they effectively last forever.

Like I say, Ireland is one of the worst countries for solar but that doesn't mean it isn't viable. And it provides a huge benefit to the grid by being uncorrelated with the other variable source electricity - wind. It simply comes down to numbers and, sorry, the numbers prove you wrong.

I checked out the generation status on the UK National grid and what you are saying is correct. Not much wind today but blue sky and 10% of electricity is coming from PV.

Another example: https://www.arla.com/company/news-and-press/2022/pressrelease/new-solar-park-in-denmark/

"Arla Foods announces ambitious collaboration with the renewable energy company Better Energy regarding four new solar parks that will cover approximately one third of Arla's electricity consumption in Denmark by 2024. It is the most extensive agreement on renewable electricity from a Danish company without public subsidies in Danish history"

A completely unsubsidised purely commercial decision. Despite the claims of someone on twitter, solar PV works and is viable in northern Europe.

Meh - it reminds me of the plans for covering the Sahara in solar panels and building massive inter-connectors to export the power to Europe. It kinda/arguably made sense when panels were considered somewhat expensive and it seemed important to maximise their efficiency. But the 90% drop in panel prices in a decade has completely undermined the financial basis of all these ideas. It's now significantly cheaper to build 4 times as many panels in northern Europe even if they operate at half the efficiency than it is to site them in Africa and build the inter-connector infrastructure.

Same with using mechanical systems to maximise panel efficiency - at some point (that we seemed to have passed), it's more economic to just add more super cheap panels, than to build and maintain auxiliary mechanical systems.

It reminds me of when microprocessors displaced "big iron" processors in super-computing - they just became so cheap that all their deficiencies in terms of performance and features could effectively be compensated for by just using more of them. Now all the biggest fastest super computers in the world are based on commodity intel/amd chips - the days of custom super-advanced designs that those of Cray are over.