Random Renewables Thread

So for a laugh I went back to 2016/17 and the demand at night seems to be about 700MW lower at 3.30am (~2900MW vs ~3600MW)

So definitely a difference, but I wonder if that can be explained by EV charging

700MW is enough to charge 100,000 EVs, so have 100,000 EVs been sold since 2017?

Short answer, no. 2022 was the best year for EV sales at ~15,000 vehicles. Total sales since 2017 are around 34,000 vehicles

So it looks like there's a demand side increase, although not nearly enough to explain the price quadrupling. And it's not down to EVs

Couple of days ago around noon, the Netherlands produced 6GW of wind and 10GW of PV. Total production from renewables 17GW, total consumption 14GW, so the price went negative. People with flexible contracts could charge up their cars and power walls and got paid for doing so.

The Netherlands is less than half the size of Ireland (26 counties) and PV over there is considerably worse than it is in Ireland. If we had the same PV per sq km, Ireland would produce 25GW from PV alone. Ireland consumes just 5GW

Solar + wind + battery is all we need

We are putting in a ground mount system in work, must check again to see what size..lots of these getting installed across local authority sites

One other issue is that they often need power when solar output is low. People tend to watch Netflix or whatever in the evening while doing their boardsing, and those data centers are where those services are being run out of

But there does need to be a hard look at the environmental impact of them. I was pretty shocked to hear some of them don't even have electricity grid connections and instead generate their own electricity from gas turbines

Green computing my arse!

Except you'd lose half to tax 😉

Yeah Octopus have definitely been putting other suppliers to shame in the UK.

I remember watching an interview with some of the senior staff there and they were saying they developed a lot of their IT systems in-house, while all the other suppliers use the same systems from the likes of Oracle or Salesforce

Using their own systems allowed them to do some stuff other suppliers couldn't. For example they had this thing called Fan Club where if you lived near a wind turbine they own and the wind is over a certain speed they got a discount on their electricity

So people would look out their windows and see the turbine spinning quickly and know to run their appliances

It’s like the rest of the business world for any service. The older players that have a captive market don’t need to innovate or delight customers (or deffo not as much). It’s not that many years ago my Mam had never moved electricity suppliers, or not in donkeys years without a major reason. That’s changed as they go to Bonkers every year now, I do it for them.

So fair play to likes of Octopus for shaking up the market. I expect they have better retention. I change gas and electricity supplier every year now, unless the current one has decent rates and I renew. That churn affects their margins. So if they had a service / more benefits / stuff others can’t provide, that entices people to stay…

You'd not want to have negative bills for a start 😂

And not everything revenue "says" stands up to scrutiny. The law is an ass sometimes and we need to fight it. Like that lady who plastered her house with PV panels without planning permission for it, but she won in the end doing us all a big favour. I'm sure we'll all be following this closely. I have no intention of paying any income tax on FIT. If that means I can't export more than €200 worth of FIT, so be it. I'll use the electricity myself. Even though this is the complete opposite of what the government should encourage (in the tax payers' interest) about micro generation.

As usual this was an ill thought out plan. Made by a begrudger, not someone with vision. Why the hell didn't the government look at other more advanced countries like the Netherlands, Germany, or even the good old UK, where FIT / net metering on private dwellings is not subject to income tax? 🙄

Indeed. The cheapest way for the government to increase renewables is to nudge private home owners into plastering their roofs with PV. Costing the tax payer not a cent (provided the silly subsidies are removed)

The Netherlands generating 10GW of PV, in March, mostly from residential. That's twice what Ireland uses in total electricity consumption at any one time. From a country less than half the size of Ireland with far worse PV than here.

The easiest fight is to not fight at all. Say nothing.

Aye if a heat pump is cheaper to run than gas depends entirely on the gas vs electricity price (even though they are 2-3 times more efficient per kWh used). I would imagine that over the coming 10-15 years, there will be ever increasing duty / tax on gas to nudge us away from burning fossil fuels and towards renewables. Whereas more and more of us make our own electricity and while we as a nation as a whole produce more renewable electricity, there will be plenty of times where wholesale electricity prices will be super cheap

So on the balance of probabilities, it is likely that heat pump heating will be considerably cheaper than fossil fuel heating...

Crypto miners, normally the bane of every environmentalist (often with good reason) are actually a very good way to heat a room. I've a 3090 GPU in my main work machine (I'm a software developer btw) and that draws down about 220 watts when it's mining. Working at home in a converted "box bedroom" it can keep the room warm and on many a day I never have to turn on the main heating in the house. Thus saving me from burning fossil fuel.

it's not responsive though as you can imagine. 220 watts doesn't bring the temp of the room up quickly, but once it gets to 20-21C or so, it can keep it there relatively well. Occasionally I have to stop it mining, but it works well.

Same thing with those dehumidifiers, which also rock in about 150-200 watts. It will take awhile but it will bring a averaged size room up about 4-5 c in 90 minutes or so. On some of the cold mornings I'd kick in the normal radiator which has a Tado automated value on it set to 19C to get the room up to temp, and then the mining would keep it there for the day.

Like you these electric heaters struggle on the baltic days, but on your mild/cold days a bit of "targeted heat" works well.