Energy infrastructure

So what are the batteries going to cost? You can not power an entire grid on nothing but renewables without massive amounts of storage.

Battery prices are falling fast… there's these sulfur lithium batteries that look promising…flow batteries…iron batteries…this rubbish doesn't cut it, they are not adequate answers. Put a number on it, what is it going to cost?

France doesn't have this problem, in 2023 they produced more zero carbon electricity than they consumed. The problem France does have are the crazy renewables zealots in the EU Commission wanting to punish them for not meeting renewables targets and committments.

What exactly is the 2050 target?

Is it an Irish-set target or and EU-legislated target?

Is it net neutral or absolute? ie, is all non-renewable generation prohibited, or would 5% generation from gas be allowed if we exported 10% renewable surplus to elsewhere?

I'm particularly interested in the last part, because it seems to me that it will cost an awful lot to 'renewabilise' the final few percent of fossily generated electricity. And that money could be more productively spent elsewhere.

I didn't say anything about batteries there.

... and it's been argued to death on the thread where it's on topic.

@Capt'n Midnight The rise in geothermal is because, while the technology is slowly getting cheaper, all the easy sites were exploited a long time ago, so each new megawatt is going to be more difficult to tap. This will eventually become true for wind (we're getting close in onshore winds in Ireland), but the untapped "easy" resources offshore are still pretty large.

I don't really understand why we're discussing Australian energy policy on such detail, but I suppose it shows a useful contrast with Ireland. Australia has got a load of coal, and it can be hard to wean yourself off such an easy option. We, on the other hand, never had any significant fossil fuel resources (two small gas fields don't cut it, and peat was horribly expensive), so we've never had to deal with that problem.

And how would any of this help during - for example - a repeat of December 2010 when Ireland had what must have been a historical case of dunkelflaute - 2 weeks roughly of temperatures below -10C and an anti-cyclone meaning no wind anywhere.

It's not enough to have a power system that works most of the time. You cannot have an electricity supply that is literally dependent on the weather, so every watt of wind and solar will still have to be backed by traditional thermal.

The Australian contrast is useful because those so against Renewables and Solar will often take things out of context and claim that Nuclear is the silver bullet to all issues.

However, we know it aint so.

These new biomatter to liquid fuels thingies are very much in their infancy, and it should be noted that the demand for liquid fuels for transport is enormous and that will likely swallow up any of the output of such plants, assuming they are able to move from paper and demonstrator projects into the real world.

As for the data surrounding 2010, it would be interesting to see what the actual wind generation stats vs. electricity demand were for December 2009 and 2010. Actually, the low wind conditions and high Weather Related Demand for those two years were so bad that they were the subject of some scientific papers.

One study looked at both years, and found that:

The analysis presented here shows that, in the context of the last 29 years, the October–February periods of 09–10 and 10–11 had some extremely cold periods and were less windy than average, with 10–11 suffering the most extreme low temperatures. Table 2 highlights that both 09–10 and 10–11 had a much higher percentage of days with extreme WRD compared to the average, with the average wind capacity factor also being significantly lower in 10–11 during these extreme days compared with the long-term average. More than 50% of the winters categorised as high demand in section 3.3 were also categorised as having low wind, which is consistent with the results of figure 3.

WRD = Weather Related Demand

So yes, Dunkelflaute is a real possibility, and it actually happened in 2009 and 2010. That means that every watt of theoretical solar and wind capacity has to be backed by the ability to generate electricity the old fashioned way. The physical generating capacity necessary to power the entire country without renewables, including providing electric heating for a large proportion of the population alongside other demand, must be present and maintained, just in case it is ever needed. The winters of 2009 and 2010 showed us that plainly.

We are not like California where their main energy demand is for air conditioning and they only have to worry about dunkelflaute for a few hours in the evening.