"Green" policies are destroying this country

Ok, maybe not. How about a gutless energy regulator?

https://www.rte.ie/radio/radio1/clips/22367057/

Obviously if it doesn't fit the "green" narrative it must be "disingenuous"

In case if you did not notice it is all about the control. It is taken right out of socialism playbook. Someone is going to prescribe exactly what energy and when you are allowed to use, what you can eat, when, how and if you can travel for holidays... Centralized planning, the whole lot.

Isn't it over 40% now?

Worse still, aren't they supposed to be getting compensation at the price of the most expensive electricity for any of their unused energy too? I don't recall too many gas turbines or coal plants getting paid for not being used (due to surplus availability) previously.

They would have had to pay some of that back in the Windfall tax. Some more of it goes to the Minister as a dividend. However, they also pay their staff a nice healthy bonus as part of their profit sharing incentive.

If you have time on your hands, here's a couple of long reads and one long listen. JP Morgan's 14th Annual Energy Paper is here:

"Electravision" is their term for the policy of widespread electrification to decarbonise things like heating and transport, powered by a decarbonised grid. Accompanying their paper is an essay by Vaclav Smil who tends to be direct and pragmatic on energy issues. Here are direct links to both PDF documents: a) JP Morgan, b) Vaclav Smil.

TL;DR (I don't mean to spam the board but the following represents a couple of hours effort in condensing both papers down to a few hundred words).

According to JPM:

• The fossil fuel share of global energy use is falling at ~0.40% per year as the renewable transition progresses. Global CO2 emissions have not declined since energy consumption keeps rising; what’s falling is the share of primary energy from fossil fuels, not their level.
• Global transition spending has exceeded fossil fuel spending for the fourth year in a row and the gap is widening.
• The grid’s use for industrial production and transport is still small.
• Current human prosperity is difficult to imagine without substantial contributions from natural gas. This gas ecosystem needs sufficient investment to avoid electricity and natural gas outages, and its methane footprint needs greater attention.
• The challenges of electrification in the US include: a ~34% increase in US electricity generation (i.e., the same % increase in power generation that took place from 1993 to 2022, a period of 30 years), a ~400% increase in wind and solar power and enough backup thermal power and battery storage to handle 53% of a much larger grid coming from intermittent renewables.
• Electrification makes less sense from a decarbonization perspective if powered by additional natural gas.
• Very little of this has beeen costed. Electricity prices have been rising faster than core inflation in the US for five years. The transition bill could be more than a trillion dollars by 2035.
• Relatively little thermal capacity can be taken offline as renewables come online. “Capacity credits” estimate the MW of gas capacity that can be disconnected for every MW of wind and solar added to the grid, and are just 10%-25% in the US. In other words, the total cost of Electravision includes redundancy of generation capacity in addition to the cost of new generation capacity, transmission and storage. Germany’s thermal power has not declined despite large additions of wind and solar capacity since 2002. CO2 emissions and thermal capacity factors have declined, but thermal plants still must be built and maintained.
• Global long duration energy storage (LDES) capacity is very small. Li-ion duration is maximum 4-6 hours.
• Low LDES capacity is due to high costs, low technological readiness and the need for improved round-trip efficiencies
• US EV sales are 10% (but only if you include PHEVs). The current car and light truck fleet is 1.5% electric.
• Targets for EV adoption face serious headwinds. Unsold inventories on dealer lots have reached an all time high. Manufacturers have cut back on production and dealers have asked for a moratorium on EV mandates.
• Clustering of EV charging behavior can substantially increase peak loads and the need for transmission.
• Heat pumps and industrial heat are also problematic as the greater efficiency of electricity is more than offset by its higher cost compared to natural gas.
• Some industry already uses combined heat and power and would resist having to pay for electric heat where it already gets it essentially for free. As a result, less than a quarter of US industry has high electrification potential, while more than a half is medium or low potential.
• US plans for electrification would need transmission growth in various regions ranging from 25% to 408% by 2035. Interconnector growth requirements would vary from 140% to 3500%. Current transmission growth is negligible compared to requirements. Massachussetts has had two projects fail due to objections from neighbouring states over transmission lines need for importation of Canadian hydropower.
• Interconnectors longer than 400 miles can take 15-20 years. Generator transformer prices have increase 70% in four years and have lead times of two years. "Without legislative and cultural changes allowing transmission to replicate the growth of the interstate highway system, fiber optic cables, national rail, civil aviation, waterways and other infrastructure, Electravision will remain just that: a vision."
• Notably, the DoE does not believe that more distributed storage necessarily results in lower transmission needs.
• The rise of AI might change everything. The PJM (mid-Atlantic) region has made sharp increases to projections of future power demand, entirely due to an increase in data centers which serve advanced computing/AI needs. Another estimate is that the AI revolution could require more power in the US than the future electric vehicle fleet.
• 80-110 GW of nuclear and fossil fuel retirements are due by 2033. Replacement of dispatchable power with intermittent solar and wind resources has increased the risks of electricity outages. NERC cites peak loads rising at “an alarming rate” due to electrification. Outages in adverse weather and normal operating conditions are more likely. MISO now warns of “immediate and serious challenges” to grid reliability due to wind/solar intermittency, and disclosed that it averted a capacity shortfall in 2023 only due to postponement of planned generation retirements.
• LCOE is a mostly useless measure when comparing renewables to baseload power. Paul Joskow (MIT): LCOE is “inappropriate for comparing intermittent generating technologies like wind and solar with dispatchable generation…and also overvalues intermittent generating technologies compared to dispatchable baseload generation”…“LCOE comparisons of baseload and intermittent, non-dispatchable generation make little sense; what’s needed instead is a system-wide model“.
• China continues to roll out huge amounts of renewable power. But it is also increasing coal consumption (106 GW of new coal plants approved in 2023). It's a familiar story: coal share is decreasing, coal usage is increasing. As with most places, new renewables are in addition to other increases in demand.
• BEV share of vehicle sales is much higher in China than elsewhere. Electrification in general is much further advanced than in the US or Europe. China emissions might plateau in the next five years or so.
• China's environmental record is a disaster which is partly why it is so competitive on polysilicon PV and rare earths. It routinely dumps toxic waste into rivers and lakes, making 70% of them unfit for human use.
• Germany is still in the dunce's corner. "Had Germany not decommissioned its nuclear, we estimate that Germany would have needed 50% less electricity generation from fossil fuels and 84% less generation from natural gas in 2022".

And my summary of Vaclav Smil's essay:

• Unless emission can be decoupled from combustion, severing modern civilization’s reliance on fossil fuels is a desirable long-term goal but one that (for many reasons) cannot be accomplished either rapidly or inexpensively.
• We remain a fossil-fueled civilization and this brief review demonstrates the high degree of our dependence and low probability, if not impossibility, of energizing the world’s economy without any fossil carbon by 2050.
• The world will remain far from reducing its energy-related CO2 emissions by 45 percent from the 2010 level by 2030: for that we would have to eliminate nearly as much fossil carbon as the combined emissions of the two largest energy consumers, China and the USA.
• The scale of the requried energy transition is unprecedented. We would have to replace 4 terawatts of generating capacity. We extracted 15.5 billion tonnes of fossil fuels in 2022. we have no real idea how to replace some of its uses.
• The transition would require decades of steady, high-level investments and political commitments.
• If more complex innovations are cheaper than the established ways, or if their higher costs are outweighed by higher quality, efficiency, and convenience, then the transitions can proceed rapidly. In contrast, renewable conversions start with the inherent disadvantages of having low power density and greater intermittency.
• Cost differences are narrowing but offshore wind plus battery storage will be still more than three times as expensive as combined cycle gas turbine (CCGT) generation.
• By 2027 advanced nuclear generation is still expected to cost at least twice as much as CCGT.
• The cost of hydrogen remains uncertain.
• Contrary to common impressions, there has been no absolute worldwide decarbonization. In fact, the very opposite is the case. The world has become much more reliant on fossil carbon (even as its relative share has declined a bit, from 86% to 82% between 1997 and 2022). Since the 1997 Kyoto protocol global fossil fuel consumption has increased 55%.
• Tripling of emissions in China and India have far surpassed emissions cuts in the US and Europe.
• To achieve net zero by 2050 we would have to now cut emissions by the equivalent of half of India or two times Saudi Arabia every year until 2050.
• Global energy demand -- even allowing for increased conversion efficiency -- will grow 15% by 2050. All of the wind and solar deployed in the last 30 years only supply 7% of primary energy demand. Even if hydro and nuclear maintain their share of generation, renewables would have to increase by a factor of seventeen to 2050, equivalent to double the current electricity generation from all sources.
• We would need 91 million tonnes of green hydrogen annually just to decarbonise steel production. 44 million tonnes would be needed for ammonia synthesis for fertiliser, without which half the world's population would die. Total hydrogen demand for industry could be 500 million tonnes. The energy for electrolysis would be the equivalent of most of 2022 electricity generation on its own (in addition to other electricity uses). Currently less than 5% of hydrogen is "green".
• All of these new processes create new materials demand. Wind turbines currently use 50 times more materials than gas generation per MW. The requirements to 2050 for copper alone would involve mining 100 billion tonnes of ore.
• Shortages of skilled labour are a huge problem any radical green energy transition.
• The IEA has estimated that meeting the global decarbonization goals would require adding or refurbishing more 80 million kilometres of transmission grids by 2040, equivalent to the entire existing global grid in 2023 and one predicated on the further mass-scale mobilization of steel, aluminum, copper, and cement.
• The envisaged transition would cost $10 trillion per year to 2050, or 10% of global GDP. In fact it would be more like 20-25% of GDP for developed countries. Comparisons to the Manhattan Project are inapt (0.3% of US GDP for three years). In fact it would be more akin to the entire US WWII expenditure as a fraction of GDP, but sustained for 30 years. Get out your ration books! It would also need the cooperation of all the world's biggest emitters, including China.
• Realistically, we are more likely to see a 50-50 fossil/non-fossil energy split by 2050.

Finally, in tune with the JP Morgan paper's warnings, the Decouple podcast had a recent episode on "Fragilization of the grid". There's a subsequent one on micro-blackouts if you want even more.

I wonder will the Green Party push for this in Ireland regardless. They pushed for an Irish version of a few EU directives that were removed/watered don lately. The NRL is one. IED is another. Pluis the EU are ramping up LNG while here the minister is telling ABP that in no way should the planning rejection for Irelands terminal in Shannon be reversed.

Its not even the noise. Its the visual pollution. They are an even worse eyesore than pylons ever were.

How can you say that “greenies” are making things worse for the planet or civilisation? Certainly that article doesn’t say anything of the sort. It elaborates on why net zero is unlikely by 2050, specifically because total energy demand is rocketing (and may increase further with the advent of AI). Meeting the burgeoning energy demands solely by increasing fossil fuel use would be far more detrimental to the planet.

No they are not. Plenty of noise videos available

Hard to tell anythign from a snippet from a farmers paper with no information on location or distance etc

They are not what?

Wind turbines are loud, if you've ever been near one you'd know that and the wind direction is important as the noise carries.

"greenie" do you need to post that in every comment 😂

Doesn't matter what size anything is once it can be recycled. That's the whole point of recycling.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YMKpCiDomgM

Most expensive electricity in Europe is about to get even more expensive.

If you want something done properly, ask a civil servant……..said nobody, ever.

Eddie O’Connor, the recently departed energy entrepreneur, was stifled at every opportunity by that same civil service. And yet they have the ear of the government.