Energy infrastructure
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Regardless of it legality, the windfarm is existing and producing energy. If it stops producing energy, the reduction will be made up by burning very expensive fossil fuels (assuming we can even get said fossil fuels to burn!). Every watt that windfarm produces is a benefit and to get it, we literally have to do nothing.
Any other source will take many years to be brought online and cost a fortune, so will make absolutely no difference to the energy mess we are in today. You can't seriously talk about "the energy mess we are in" when your solutions wont exist for decades at best, if ever. Your posting on the issue is completely disingenuous and destroys a thread on one of the most important issues we face with otherwise knowledgeable contributors.
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The attraction of renewables is that it is far easier to persuade buy-in so you can theoretically build more of them more quickly. Nuclear has an image and a cost problem in the eyes of the public, which it will just not live down. That automatically creates potential delays in the development process and meanwhile renewables rapidly proliferate to deliver energy. Ultimately one has to build an infrastructure around what can be done.
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All of that would make sense if it held true.
When someone dismisses nuclear on one hand for being too expensive, needing backup reserve, and taking too long, yet on the other hand advocates for renewables with zero figures on how much capacity we'll need, how much it will cost, how long it will take, or what we do when the wind doesn't blow and the sun doesn't shine for days on end, then that's not a well thought out basis on which to proceed with securing our future energy needs.
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Truth is not the problem, image is. Given what's happening in Ukraine, you'd find few if any governments keen to go nuclear and then you have to convince the population. It's that age old problem of clashing technologies, where one wins out just by being more appealing and easier to sell.
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Pretty much all of that has been answered many times already with the exception of the cost one. As its not a public cost it doesn't matter a jot.
Where cost comes into it is where private investors baulk at LCOE and the Public purse has to step in. Wind and solar do not have this issue.
As for the power source with waste that kills for thousands of years, there's multiple mod posts pointing to the nuclear thread for discussion of it so it might be an idea to move the discussion there
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Installing 2.5x times our energy requirements as offshore wind would mean we could run the country from 95% asynchronous wind + 5% synchronous generation 49% of the time. So a little under half the time we'd have surplus power to store or export, it's the area above the 40% capacity factor.
The other half of the time we'd need to use backup wind with other generation, storage and imports. Even with pessimistic assumptions about them the area on the right hand side of the graph between the blue line and below the 40% line is about a quarter of annual demand so even if it's mostly done with gas and we'd still meet our 80% reduction target.
That 2.5x of offshore wind is one option. It represents a highest cost. As in there is no point spending more. (If you could get planning permission onshore wind could be rolled out in a year or two at a much lower cost.)
Solar is a no-brainer as it's cheap (and just got 10% cheaper) and peak demand is during daylight hours during the less windy season. Bord Na Mona have oodles of land. Old landfill sites might be an option too. Solar would take up a good bit of the slack on the right hand side. Did I mention that solar is cheap ?
Notes:
If you look at the half hour average of total UK offshore wind farm output over 5 years and sort the half hours then the output is close to linear. Individual wind farms are more variable, but spread across the UK it evens out.
https://energynumbers.info/uk-offshore-wind-capacity-factors allow scripts, hit pause on graph and click all. ( 1/2.5 = 40% and 95% of that is 38% )
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The question of price comes in when you add everything together ,the layers of complexity all have a cost ..
So if it's wind ,and batteries or flywheels gas back up and possibly coal and oil backing that up , ( and add pumped storage and Interconnectors ,+ grid costs )
Nuclear would be largely similar , (possibly more spinning reserve ..) but with a higher up front cost and maybe a lower fuel cost ...
Add in solar and that's another layer ... And south facing solar may produce most electricity,but over a short time meaning more back up needed -
Yup panels are cheap ,or wind is cheap , but there are layers of cost for it to be effective..
No one has ever described nuclear as cheap , and you still have the layers of cost and complexity to add on top of the initial cost ..
Gas was cheap , but that's past tense
Post edited by Markcheese onSlava ukraini 🇺🇦
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And cost is the most important factor - no point in getting to 100% renewable through wind and solar if our electricity ends up completely unaffordable or completely unreliable (or both).
The sole source of revenue for investors to make a return on renewable investments is by setting an appropriate price on their product - every megawatt hour of energy they produce. Just as with any generation source, including nuclear.
The bigger the upfront investment, the more they need to recoup, which means the more they need to charge per megawatt hour, the more the retailers have to charge the users, which translates directly into more expensive electricity for every customer on this island.
It is also completely false to say wind and solar has not been subsidised - the Public Service Obligation levy is precisely that, a subsidy on renewable generation tacked onto everyone's bills since 2010. For this year it was a minimum of €51.60 for every single electricity customer (commercial customers pay more based on the size of their connection to the grid). No need to go to the public purse when it can be subsidised directly at source.
Finally, I'm not here to discuss nuclear itself. I'm here to point out you can't write off one form of generation based on a particular set of criteria that you essentially want to just gloss over when assessing another form of generation.
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Regardless, there's legislation blocking it from legally being built here so it's a moot point as it'll never happen here.
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But cost is the very reason that solar PV and wind are dominating new generation capacity globally. The (global) average cost of of a MWh of electricity from a new nuclear plant is $167, the same for on-shore wind is $39 and for solar PV (at grid scale), it's $32 - look at Lazard's LCOE report. As a result, of all generation capacity added around the world last year, 85% of it was either wind or solar PV.
As for the PSO, it's not correct to call this a subsidy these days. Although it was originally designed to be one - for peat electricity generation. But now it's linked to the RESS contracts-for-difference. Which means it can turn negative. And in fact this is what's happened as a result of the high wholesale prices - so the average domestic customer will RECEIVE about 90 euro next year instead of paying 50 euro this year.
In fact wind generators are expected to hand over nearly HALF A BILLION euro next year as a result of the high wholesale electricity prices. This is from a form of generation that required absolutely no capital investment by the government.
One problem with this thread is that it's a long one and so nearly all this stuff has been discussed before. It's not your fault for not reading years of previous postings. But equally, for people who have contributing to it for years, a lot of the arguments are just assumed which may be why you think nuclear isn't getting a fair consideration.
Nearly all criteria used to evaluate different forms of generation has been discussed here. And all generation types have some pros and cons so you need to look at all the factors together and not cherry pick. For example, the thread is often dragged down by someone arriving and triumphantly declaring that wind and solar are INTERMITTENT - as if that was news to anyone - and therefore are useless. A more balanced/informed view would see that this negative attribute is more than balanced by the many pros: cheapness, quick to deploy, almost zero operating cost, zero fuel cost, carbon-free, etc.
Unfortunately for nuclear, there is only one single factor - fuel cost - which is even vaguely competitive - and that still loses to wind or solar PV which have zero fuel costs. In terms of capital cost, construction timeframe, operating cost, dispatchability, flexibility, decommissioning costs, nuclear is mediocre or terrible.
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And there it is. The old wind and solar can't provide 100% of our power all the time non-argument.
It's only valid if you go out of your way to ignore daily pumped storage and interconnectors and biomass and CHP and waste to energy, and intermittent use of gas within the carbon limits and cost reductions in energy to fuel and batteries and flywheels and demand shedding and hydro and solar and possibly geothermal if someone figures out a cheaper way to drill holes etc. etc.
I'm betting you will still fail to understand that an oversupply of renewables is a way to improve the capacity factor. It'll never be 100%, but it will never have to be because there are - gasp ! - alternatives to solar and wind. But they cost more so there's a balance.
You can write off forms of generation if there are better, cheaper, quicker alternatives. We need to meet carbon targets by 2030 so anything that arrives later means we'd have to pay twice which rules out relying on megaprojects. Geothermal here is still too expensive, as you'd need to down a few Km (oil drilling depths) to get the good stuff. In Northern Ireland it might be cost competitive with nuclear. Osmotic power should be easy here as we have lots of coastal rivers, but bio-fouling of membranes means it's not technically feasible yet. It's too cloudy for concentrated solar and like wise for sun tracking panels. Fossil fuel is too expensive to use if there are cheaper generators available, to that end we are moving to a grid that can take up to 95% asynchronous power. Biomass isn't big here. Months worth of grid level hydrogen storage should be practicable by 2030, but not today. A Shannon barrage using Foynes as a separate basin to allow power generation more of the time would take a long time to get planning and construction for. Haven't heard much about the 300MW tidal plant off Northern Ireland for a while.
There's lots of options but solar is cheap in summer and wind is good a lot of the time especially during the cold dark months.
BTW Solar in the UK provided over 3.3GW today from 0.08% of the land. They plan to increase that to 0.6% which would be nearly 25GW output in Autumn from less land than is currently used by golf courses. There's one TW of solar installed around the world. It's expected to treble within the next 3 years.
BTW Sizewell-C alone could add up to £4 per month to UK household bills if it goes ahead. That would be like using the €51.60 to pay for 300MW here. Or you could look at how much gas costs have increased compared to the % of power we get from wind.
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The only benefits accrue to the speculators behind these windfarms as evidenced by 20 years of ever increasing energy prices and now the prospects of blackouts this winter.
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Meanwhile in the real world consumers continue to get gouged while the likes of SSE, Energia etc. rake in record profits - but hay ho keep pumping out the wind/solar is cheap BS🙄
PS: Germany just announced a 65 billion euro package to buffer the public there from escalating energy prices - what happened all that "cheap wind and solar" on that grid???
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Do you not get bored of these nightly vomits of nonsense? Just curious as you've been at it for a few years now
Even by the law of averages you should have, even accidently, posted a reasonable contribution at this stage
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But cost is the very reason that solar PV and wind are dominating new generation capacity globally. The (global) average cost of of a MWh of electricity from a new nuclear plant is $167, the same for on-shore wind is $39 and for solar PV (at grid scale), it's $32 - look at Lazard's LCOE report. As a result, of all generation capacity added around the world last year, 85% of it was either wind or solar PV.
Wind and solar has been heavily subsidised to date globally. The current anomaly around gas prices has just had the added consequence that it looks much cheaper currently compared to gas produced power. But it doesn't account for all of the ancilliary costs that need to make solar work as a primary generation source - storage. Nor will it remain relatively cheap if the current gas price madness calms down again. And of course, the ultimate limit, is that our electricity prices, even before the Russia war sent fossil prices spiralling upwards, were bordering on unsustainble and amongst the most expensive in Europe.
You also have to consider that those who are adding significant amounts of generation - primarily India and China - are doing renewables in tandem with traditional generation plant such as coal, oil and gas, not instead of. Surely China of all people would know how to develop a grid with all these things we're told will save us from fossil - wholly renewable, hydrogen storage, grid scale storage, given that's where we're ultimately manufacturing most of these systems? Why aren't they going all in on renewables? Is it that they know something we don't (or perhaps some refuse to accept)?
As for the PSO, it's not correct to call this a subsidy these days. Although it was originally designed to be one - for peat electricity generation. But now it's linked to the RESS contracts-for-difference. Which means it can turn negative. And in fact this is what's happened as a result of the high wholesale prices - so the average domestic customer will RECEIVE about 90 euro next year instead of paying 50 euro this year.
It was not "primarily for peat" - peat generation was knowingly being wound down, no new peat generation was being planned or built, two of the three such power stations are now shut, with the remaining converted to biomass.
It was primarily to cover the enourmous costs get wind and renwables online, including the costs associated with grid and transmission alteration to allow them to feed into a synchronouse grid, because, wait for it, they couldn't recover their costs based on then market rates!
When is a subsidy not a subsidy? When it's a green subsidy it seems...
However, as you say, it is indeed true that the PSO will turn into a credit on bills on account of the bumper profits wind generators make currently, given that wholesale costs are tied to the most expensive form of generation which at the moment is gas. Should gas dip back to previous levels, then the PSO will just as quickly turn back into a net cost on everyone's bills once more. Indeed, if the current situation around gas didn't arise, the chances are the PSO would have carried on as normal as a net cost to every single electricity bill.
In fact wind generators are expected to hand over nearly HALF A BILLION euro next year as a result of the high wholesale electricity prices. This is from a form of generation that required absolutely no capital investment by the government.
No, just twelve years of
subsidies"obligations" on every single user's bill...One problem with this thread is that it's a long one and so nearly all this stuff has been discussed before. It's not your fault for not reading years of previous postings. But equally, for people who have contributing to it for years, a lot of the arguments are just assumed which may be why you think nuclear isn't getting a fair consideration.
Wow, we are at high levels of patronising here aren't we...
Perhaps the reason these arguments continue on, 3 years and rolling in the case of this thread, is because all of the arguments against non-renewable energy sources like fossil and nuclear have failed to actually progress any further into becoming viable such that they negate any arguments for continuing to have to consider them.
And yet we're now at a situation where we have more renewables than ever on our grid, facing into power cuts and longer term shortfalls in generation capacity over the coming years.
Imagine we were told 10-12 years ago that, forget about wind producing our peak energy needs, there will be days and even weeks on end when it can't even contribute dougle digit percentages of our overall electrical demands. We'll still have no viable way of storing our demand beyond a couple of hundred megawatt hours (when our daily electrical consumption is measured in tens of gigawatt hours).
Would it still have been pursued as aggressively in isolation?
Would we have continued shutting, or allowing onward progression towards shutting, aging generation plants instead of refitting them to extend their lives, while making little to no arrangements to build any new ones?
Would we have allowed a situation arise where our baseload plants traditionally have up to 16 weeks of fuel supply on-site to provide 100% output, to one where we universally have a few hours to 2-3 days of immediate fuel to hand, at best?
So I'm afraid you'll have to accept people will therefore remain highly susceptible to claims that offshore wind and solar will suddenly be the magic saviour that onshore wind has failed spectacularly to be and will not readily accept being told that we must only pursue these forms of energy in exclusivity and not even entertain the possibility that, perhaps, we'll have no choice but to look at other forms of generation to completely eradicate fossil fuels to keep the lights on over the next 10, 20, 50 years.
We've been walked into the current electricity supply crisis and if we carry on as some on here are proposing we're going to just keep walking further down the same road based on nothing but the hope it takes us somewhere better than we currently are facing.
Nearly all criteria used to evaluate different forms of generation has been discussed here. And all generation types have some pros and cons so you need to look at all the factors together and not cherry pick. For example, the thread is often dragged down by someone arriving and triumphantly declaring that wind and solar are INTERMITTENT - as if that was news to anyone - and therefore are useless. A more balanced/informed view would see that this negative attribute is more than balanced by the many pros: cheapness, quick to deploy, almost zero operating cost, zero fuel cost, carbon-free, etc.
Unfortunately for nuclear, there is only one single factor - fuel cost - which is even vaguely competitive - and that still loses to wind or solar PV which have zero fuel costs. In terms of capital cost, construction timeframe, operating cost, dispatchability, flexibility, decommissioning costs, nuclear is mediocre or terrible.
No, THE problem with this thread is when posters rule out all other forms of securing supply in the immediate term - LNG, CNG, nuclear, continued expansion of fossil generatoin - on grounds of costs, timelines, relability and uptime, but insist we must pursue wind, solar, interconnectors and yet-to-be-realised mass hydrogen production and grid scale storage, but provide zero figures on costs, timelines, reliability and uptime, or even basic calculations to show it can even be achieved in the first place.
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And there it is. The old wind and solar can't provide 100% of our power all the time non-argument.
It's only valid if you go out of your way to ignore daily pumped storage and interconnectors and biomass and CHP and waste to energy, and intermittent use of gas within the carbon limits and cost reductions in energy to fuel and batteries and flywheels and demand shedding and hydro and solar and possibly geothermal if someone figures out a cheaper way to drill holes etc. etc.
The whole point of a modern electricity network is that it is stable and secure and can provide sufficient generation for the demand placed on it, when that demand is placed on it and not when the wind blows and the sun shines.
It is ridiculous that the "old wind and solar can't provide 100% of our power all the time non-argument" has to keep being pointed out and that we can't focus our future energy needs on something that can't answer that basic 100% question. Because:
pumped storage
is currently only Turlough Hill, 292MW of power output at peak, which it can only sustain for up 4-6 hours a day. Round trip efficiency in the 70% range, so needs over 400MWh of input power for every 292MWh it provides back to the grid
interconnectors
relies on there being excess supply to give at the other end. Are we going to continue to outsource our energy security? Are we going to be happy to buy "dirty" or "radioactive" energy because it wasn't produced in our own "backyards"? If we can't build the alternatives ourselves at reasonable cost, why do you assume others will?
biomass
our current sole biomass plant, Edenderry, is capable of 120MW peak output. The two other ex-peat plants were refused conversion to biomass. Chances are Edenderry will meet the same fate when its license ends in 2030
CHP
is traditionally burning something and producing power from the majority of the fuel energy and utilising the remainder in the form of heat that would be otherwise blown out the exhaust or by colling fans as hot water heating. What would we burn at scale?
waste to energy
Our current only waste to energy plant produces 60MW of output and was strongly contested by the Green Party way back when. How many more will be permitted to open, and how much rubbish will we have to feed it without creating a situation where it's cheaper to burn material we would otherwise have sent to be recycled?
intermittent use of gas within the carbon limits
with our current plant, converting them to intermittent use will increase our net CO2 per MWh. The majority of our plant are combined cycle. If you run these intermittently you essentially only run them as open cycle at about 30% efficiency since you don't have the sustained heat output for the combined cycle side to oeprate (50-60% overall effiiency). The constant heating/cooling is also not what these plants were designed for and that will cause premature wear of the plant
cost reductions in energy to fuel and batteries and flywheels
Such as? Current BESS projects are a few hundred megawatt hours out of a total demand in the tens of gigawatt hours
demand shedding
which is essentially a co-ordinated blackout and not really the grounds on which to build a stable and secure grid, particularly if you end up having to constantly call in your demand side units without giving them any window to "catch up"
and hydro and solar and possibly geothermal if someone figures out a cheaper way to drill holes etc. etc.
Now we're starting to get to the crux of the issue - IF someone figures it out... more on that later...
I'm betting you will still fail to understand that an oversupply of renewables is a way to improve the capacity factor. It'll never be 100%, but it will never have to be because there are - gasp ! - alternatives to solar and wind. But they cost more so there's a balance.
Not at all, I'd just love to know how much it would cost. Particularly if those other technologies don't involve fossil fuel based energy sources.
I'd love to see us at a situation where we capture every megawatt hour of wind energy regardless of the time of the day or night, storing that in the most efficienct way to be drawn down when we need it as opposed to when it happens, while simultaneously allowing us to feed gigawatts of energy out to our continential neighbours, whilst also producing tons upon tons of hydrogen for global markets. That would be absoutely incredible for this country. If we were first to do it, we'd be global leaders. The amount of money through income, taxation, employment and consulting this country would make would be far beyond what the MNC's have done for us.
But when you then look at where the technology lies:
- BESS doesn't seem to be able to scale to gigawatt hour levels at reasonable cost
- hydrogen is still in its relatively early days and relatively poor round trip efficiency figures
- hydrogen can also produce some nasty by-products in its production, and again at the point of use in certain applications
- hydro can only produce so much before it starts to become damaging to the environment itself through excavation and diverting water courses to fill the dam
- no-one seems sure offshore will even meet our overall electricty consumption needs in exclusivity, never mind have an excess to do all of the above in addition.
You can write off forms of generation if there are better, cheaper, quicker alternatives. We need to meet carbon targets by 2030 so anything that arrives later means we'd have to pay twice which rules out relying on megaprojects. Geothermal here is still too expensive, as you'd need to down a few Km (oil drilling depths) to get the good stuff. In Northern Ireland it might be cost competitive with nuclear. Osmotic power should be easy here as we have lots of coastal rivers, but bio-fouling of membranes means it's not technically feasible yet. It's too cloudy for concentrated solar and like wise for sun tracking panels. Fossil fuel is too expensive to use if there are cheaper generators available, to that end we are moving to a grid that can take up to 95% asynchronous power. Biomass isn't big here. Months worth of grid level hydrogen storage should be practicable by 2030, but not today. A Shannon barrage using Foynes as a separate basin to allow power generation more of the time would take a long time to get planning and construction for. Haven't heard much about the 300MW tidal plant off Northern Ireland for a while.
OK, perhaps we're at loggerheads as I'm looking more towards 2050.
Honestly I don't think we'll hit our 2030 targets.
Moneypoint and Tarbert are going to have to remain for most, if not all, of the rest of this decade which is going to seriously hurt us on emissions. They'll leave a literal hole in our generation, 1.5GW which is more than a quarter of our peak demand. We're going to have significantly more electrical demand on the grid by 2030 to boot (1mn EV's, 600k heatpumps, growing population) and it seems significant additional gas generation is going to be needed along with extremely inefficient peaker plants (typically oil fired as opposed to gas). Any wind added by then is only playing catch-up, not replacing existing fossil based sources. I don't see any breakthrough in grid storage technology coming by then - even at that, you can only store excess if it's there to begin with, with it may well not be.
We need to be planning for 2050 and making sure that we're not going to face decades of uncertain electrical security and supply-demand gaps for that time. If we just about make it to 2030, and then by 2040 realise we're back at a supply crunch, what then, to be net zero by 2050? Far too late to start considering any alternatives we might be keen to rule out now.
Why would nuclear be cost competitive for NI and not here, given we're one single electricty market and they are about a quarter of our total island load? Would a reactor along the Antrim coast line be any less objectionable to one placed along the East Coast? Are we going to allow NI become the pioneers in hydrogen and grid scale storage projects, if they can use all this excess energy from a nuclear plant to do that under the "carbon neutral" brand?
Now, IF hydrogen storage is possible at grid scale levels, as round trip time seems to be 30% range, so 100MWh of input energy required for every 30MWh realised in electricity. No-one has cracked hydrogen storage at scale yet - you would assume one of the Germans, the US, China or Japan would have done it by now, or come pretty damn close to it.
Were we to go with it anyway, looking at just our peak daytime usage 0800-2000, we average about 4.75GWh each hour across the 12, or 57GWh in total, we'd need to have nearly 16GW of sustained output for those 12 hours (192GWh) to produce enough hydrogen to then produce enough electricity just for our current - but rapidly growing - daytime demand.
If offshore wind has a capacity factor of 50%, say, then we need over 32GW of sustained output for 12 hours a day (384GWh) to meet the live supply demand while also buildling up enough stored hydrogen for the other 50% of the time the wind doesn't below.
That's all before 1mn EVs, 600k heat pumps, however many thousand new homes, or a single ton of hydrogen is sold abroad.
There's lots of options but solar is cheap in summer and wind is good a lot of the time especially during the cold dark months.
BTW Solar in the UK provided over 3.3GW today from 0.08% of the land. They plan to increase that to 0.6% which would be nearly 25GW output in Autumn from less land than is currently used by golf courses. There's one TW of solar installed around the world. It's expected to treble within the next 3 years.
Was that gigawatt peak output? Or cumulative gigawatt hours? 3.3GWh would be enough for about 30-40 minutes of our peak midweek daytime demand...
BTW Sizewell-C alone could add up to £4 per month to UK household bills if it goes ahead. That would be like using the €51.60 to pay for 300MW here. Or you could look at how much gas costs have increased compared to the % of power we get from wind.
Sizewell-C seems to be a basket case, like HS2. Perhaps indicative of nuclear as a whole, perhaps not.
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Someone should create a Nuclear power thread
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3400MW coming from renewables at the minute. Days like these we are in absolutely motoring. Plenty of gas being saved too.
The 2 interconnectors are exporting ag mad capacity now too. 1000MW heading across the Irish Sea
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Another windfarm just got planning in Donegal, 60MW
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650 acre solar farm has been approved by ABP following a planning appeal
No idea the planned output of it
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And perhaps rename this "Aspirational Future Energy Infrastructure"
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Not sure if it’s been discussed here before; but is it time for a discussion around perhaps examining replacing some of our older windfarms with newer turbines with greater energy production?
Some of our earliest windfarms are in our windiest areas, with turbines less than 2MW. Given the latest turbines can generate twice that, they could be installed to provide higher more consistent power.
Theres several wind farms between Tralee and Cordal, Co. Kerry along the Stacks Mtns range into the Mullaghareirk mountains. These are spinning even on calm days and are absolutely motoring on very windy days. It’s surely an asset being wasted on low yielding turbines.
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The ABP case file is here. This is from the inspectors report.
The development would comprise 3,990 strings of photovoltaic panels, each string would contain between 25 and 125 panels resulting in an anticipated total of 410,575
[..]
The proposed development with an expected output capacity of c 220MW will deliver an additional renewable energy source, which will help Ireland reach its targets.
220MW would put it on the much larger size for the solar developments that I've seen get planning permission. Many seem to be much smaller in the 10-75MW range.
I sometimes forget just how many panels are needed. This will require over four hundred thousand panels. It really puts into perspective the trouble I'm having trying to find 9 panels for my own house.
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I don't think we've discussed re-powering wind farms on this thread in the last few years. I recommend reading this report from Wind Energy Association of Ireland on re-powering wind farms: https://windenergyireland.com/images/files/repoweringes.pdf
It provides a nice definition of re-powering to keep everyone on the same page:
A potential WF repowering definition is given below; ‘renewing wind farms by the complete decommissioning and replacement of wind turbine generator equipment at a site for the purposes of replacing or increasing capacity and/or increasing the efficiency of the installation. Existing site infrastructure like grid connection equipment may be retained and reused where possible.’
It includes a nice contrast of re-powering versus life-time extension:
Lifetime Extension (LTE) involves upgrading or replacing necessary parts to enable WTGs to operate beyond their design life. Generally, for LTE projects, the layout of the WF remains the same. LTE allows the continued use of productive wind sites, can lower the levelised cost of energy (LCOE) and can increase return on investment. It is a lower risk, shorter-term alternative to repowering.
Repowering involves the complete decommissioning and replacement of old WTG equipment at a site, with existing infrastructure like roads and grid connection equipment being retained and reused where possible. New foundations are likely to be required and the layout and number of WTGs normally changes. The dismantling process for wind farms can typically take 6 – 12 months but new turbines can be erected as old ones are dismantled, in some cases. Repowering returns a WF back to the start of the life-cycle process and can significantly increase installed capacity
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Yeah its a big one alright. Cheers for the details on it
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Efficiency isn't an issue when you are using surplus renewable power which is essentially free. A round trip efficiency of 40% is cheaper than paying three times as much for fossil fuel.
Turlough Hill is about 6 hours, 400MWh of intermittent wind is cheaper than burning 292MWh of fossil fuel 365 days a year.
Interconnectors work both ways. Had the Celtic Interconnector was running we'd have been exporting constantly across it since April.
A 120MW biomass plant will provide stability to allow up to 2.4GW of wind / solar on the grid in the near future. It's a multiplier.
CHP can also apply to process heat. That where you need high temperatures for industrial processes. The waste heat could be used to generate steam. And the waste heat form that could be used for district heating saving further fossil fuel. Not sure about the economics.
Yes running gas open cycle will increase the CO2 per MWh. But alternatives to fossil fuel mean we'll need fewer MWh generated that way so overall the CO2 will decrease.
(BESS) Batteries don't scale that well but prices have dropped 90% over the last decade. Batteries on our grid have kicked in within 0.18 of a second of a disturbance in the force. Cheaper than keeping high inertial generators spinning.
Hydrogen has an abysmal 40% round trip whether you use fuel cells or CCGT. But you can store months worth of the stuff.
What nasty products are there from hydrolysis. (green hydrogen - other colours aren't green)
- no-one seems sure offshore will even meet our overall electricty consumption needs in exclusivity, never mind have an excess to do all of the above in addition.
100% sure it won't meet our needs all the time. Technically at times onshore wind has already hit 96% of our needs if you say that all the exports at that time were from fossil fuel. Having 2.5 times our peak demand in wind would mean that on average it would supply most of our needs.
- OK, perhaps we're at loggerheads as I'm looking more towards 2050.
We have to meet 2030. If we meet 2030 we then have 20 years to reduce carbon by 1% a year. Wind and solar have 20 year commercial lives. So we could use them to bridge to a new technology. But that new technology would be competing with the LCOE of refurbishing wind or solar. And there's 40 year old panels out there still producing 80% of original power so the LCOE of solar is practically zero unless you count the opportunity cost of replacing existing panels with more efficient ones.
The breakthrough in storage is hydrogen in disused gas wells. Lookup the costs of the Rough Storage Facility in the UK and what % of our annual demand it could store. Months of storage.
- Why would nuclear be cost competitive for NI and not her
I was suggesting that geothermal in NI might be cost competitive with nuclear as the hot rocks are closer to the surface than down here.
There is no excess energy from a nuclear plant. It's all baseload. There's no peaking energy , any surplus is from other generators. Even in the extreme case of France during a normal summer most if not all of the surplus matched the non-nuclear generation. (there were day/night imports/exports)
- No-one has cracked hydrogen storage at scale yet
Gas wells have stored the stuff as part of the mix since it was formed millions of years ago. There's a good few factories being built that can produce 1GW of hydrolysers per year. And it's only to use surplus power to use (months?) later for peaking plant so you'd be making and storing it for longer than you'd be using it. So you don't need 1GW of hydrolyser for every GW of gas turbine.
On the 12th of August solar got over 8GW at times in the UK. It could have powered our country during most of the working day.
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Looks like good quality agricultural land and at €12,000 an acre, the land value alone is €8m. I'm all in favour of carpeting poor land or desiccated Bord na Mona bog with panels, but when prime agr land is being used I wonder if some other location couldn't have been found.
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Great isn’t it!
Pity we get so many days where wind and solar don’t meet our demands and we have to burn fossil fuels.
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Its the land the company owns 🤷♀️
I guess if they owned bog, they'd put them there
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Has anyone here looked at this technology: cryogenic storage of liquid air? The British company Highview Power is building a commercial 50MW for five hours storage and generation plant, that is due to start operation this year. They claim up to 60% efficiency can be achieved which makes it sound quite practical and which could be scaled up easily in terms of numbers of units. It might not be so practical for long term energy storage, but one interesting use case I saw was to power night time air-conditioning in hot climates with reliable solar power, so basically a daily 8 hour cycle.
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