Energy infrastructure

I've explained this already. The state rarely build power plants anymore. It's all private or semi private.

You all need to get this idea out of your heads that Minister is gonna come along with a blank cheque for someone to build energy infra.

There's been nearly 50 wind farms completed in the last 10 years. Nordex and Siemens are the main manufacturers

True, we pay someone else to capture it though, plus it's not as clean as wind or solar.

We will need Gas and Oil but only as a backup to wind and solar.

it wouldn't matter how it was generated, you'd still be paying the same price. Remember, before any energy generation infra is built, investors have all the electricity is will make sold at a set price before a shovel is even put in the ground, thats just how it works.

It's not 100% reliable I agree and as I've already mentioned, until we have a mechanism to store excess energy we will need Fossil fuels as a backup. The energy costs now have NOTHING to do with a plant that was constructed X years ago. Energy resellers are just ripping people off because they can.

You've the wrong end of the stick.
Ireland (Dublin) is of of the biggest IT Hubs in Europe, we don't manufacture computers here, yeah Intel have a plant here but that's it. It's all run here though. Lots of the DC's, lots of the jobs etc.

Same applies to Wind Power. We don't manufacture the equipment, but we do and will run a massive amount of it.

Just to be absolutely clear, the idea of being completely insular and isolated (IE we only use the stuff we manufacture ourselves) is what kept Ireland as the sick child (economically speaking) in Europe post WW2.

That's not true at all, some Irish companies are at the absolute cutting edge of the design work, they're just not designing the individual turbines.

Actually a big problem we're having right now isn't in the lack of opportunity, but in lack of enough engineers to capitalise on the opportunity.

Its just a shame that the ESB and the government sat on their hands for so long. We could be in a similar position to Portugal if they hadn't dragged their feet for so long. We can thank the Greens for putting a Bunsen under their bums.

Unfortunately it's not exactly been an unqualified success. In 1990, Germany met 31% of its electricity needs through non-fossil sources. By 2022, that had risen to 50%.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electricity_sector_in_Germany#/media/File:Energiemix_Deutschland.svg

Why on Earth would Ireland want to build an energy interconnector to Spain? The distance to France is shorter, their energy is cleaner and they can generate non-fossil electricity just as well on calm winter nights as on sunny/windy summer days.

There's an old saying: "The proof of the pudding is in the eating" and it very much applies here. If you're going to claim that your policy will lead to cheap electricity, you need to prove that this is what people will be paying in the real world in their energy bills.

Renewables only make sense with massive and diverse interconnects.

Would you like to guess how much it cost to build the electric grid in the first place, it wasn't cheap.

Every major system shift costs.

Everything has to be index linked to get a fair comparison. I know for a fact that Ardnacrusha took half of the total national budget for a few years - and that didn't even account for the early grid costs which would have been a massive ongoing cost.

Depending on just how cheap they are really are per cycle -

Is Greenlink still on schedule?

Interesting that in the Cso report, they mention that peak energy consumption for very large consumers , is in the middle of the day , between 1 and 3 pm , which would tend to work well with summer solar -

https://www.rte.ie/news/business/2024/0723/1461350-electricity-consumption-by-data-centres-up-20-last-year/

should large industry be obligated to put solar on roof tops and car parks ?

Iron-air chemistry is rechargeable.

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/rusty-batteries-could-greatly-improve-grid-energy-storage/

Which is why is why i was suggesting large commercial users should probably have roof panels, no transmission losses obviously , and peak consumption for large commercial is afternoon - 12 or 1 til l3 , which coincides with peak solar production ,

I assume part of that is the cooling load for data centres ,large buildings ect , the panels would help shade the roof from the suns heat ..

That's mental. I thought it was 4 kWh LOL

Every job "offloaded" to a datacentre incurs a pretty heavy overhead. It makes sense to do this only when the DC alone has the means needed to perform the operation (e.g. web search and other heavy computation with large datasets), but I've seen local client applications offload trivial calculations to "the backend" for the sole reason that it's less hassle than doing it locally.

As an industry, Web-based services have as much interest in energy efficiency as the US car industry did in the 1960s when petrol was ten cents a gallon…

"Very little energy". Do you know how much, or are you assuming that it's not much because "everyone does it"?

Do you imagine that a datacentre CPU is more energy efficient than the one in your mobile phone? And that's before considering the transmission costs inside and outside the DC.

YouTube isn't actaully that big an energy user per client: it pulls data from a filestore and copies it into a transmission buffer: there's very little computation needed, and this can be (and is) done in hardware to save even more energy. The big hogs are the medium-usage services behind your mobile apps that aren't big enough that optimisation would be commercially beneficial, but are still big enough that their inefficiency is significant.

However, the energy efficiency of software, while of nterest to me, is off topic in this thread, so I'll leave my comments at this, except to say that because DCs are such a big part of our energy consumption, the inefficiency of that software does have an impact on our environmental targets, and it's one over which we have little control.

I don't know how much energy is required to send a packet but it's not what's flowing through the cables which use the most energy. It's the routers switches gateways and firewalls which consume a tonne. Touch them and you'll find that they are very much hot and are critical in sending data. Also the surface area of a cpu is much lower than that of a cable so even if both had the same power running through them the temperature would not be the same.

That said I have no problem with data centers. They pay for the power they use so are paying for the expansion of the network. As long as they don't cause Brown outs or black outs of course.