Random Renewables Thread

I have not been proven wrong. It's reasonably simple maths. I have given the costings multiple times and gotten nothing but silence and side slipping topic changes.

Even the very expensive Finnish OK-3 reactor, recently completed and commissioned, which was far more expensive than Korean built reactors, is far cheaper than commercial scale solar in Ireland, if you care to do the maths.

German dealers say private orders for electric cars have fallen by nearly half in 2024

July 31, 2024

That no ICE by 2030 might come to pass, but i doubt it from current trends. A survey of EV owners in the US recently found near 50% of current EV owners intend to switch back to ICE with their next purchase.

Well stupid people need to have their stupid choices taken away from them by the government if the world is to survive for much longer

No one is talking about the environment destroying waste of nuclear? For thousands of years.

Fusion is the future once we work it out

Nah I'll just switch to the EPS supply on my inverter and good ol' Sol and lithium will provide 🤣

Given our construction costs, would it not have been a better idea to not build the National Childrens Hospital, or the motorways, or come to think of it, wouldn't these extra costs also make the already hugely expensive offshore wind farms even worse of an idea than they are already? It's a zero sum game. We need the NCH so we build it, even though the same thing in Perth cost a fraction. Nuclear likely would cost more to build here, but that applies to renewables infrastructure, and power grids - speaking of which, I haven't even factored the savings on grid build out for renewables into my cost savings yet.

You could put me on ignore, in order to save your precious time. It's the best way to fix things when discussions are not to your liking.

And what happens if there's a shutdown?

Wouldn't it be more economical to build more interconnectors to piggyback off France and the UK's nuclear power supply?

Interconnectors are a mugs game. The Celtic interconnector is on course for costing €2-3 billion for a paltry 0.7GW of capacity. The white elephant is so over budget they have stopped issuing reports about by how much it's over budget.

If it ends up costing €2.5 billion, that's €3.57 billion per GW of capacity, of which it generates none - zero - nada. We have to pay for the energy on top of that. Poland were recently was offered six APR-1400 reactors by S Korea at €2.94 billion per GW.

Do I really need to explain which is a better use of money? Even without mentioning that Russian Kilo class subs have now twice been skulking near the Irish sea? You'd have thought Nordstream would have put paid to stupid enthusiasm for interconnectors, but it seems not.

You can not rely on spare French nuclear, because the stupid Germans are making the same mistake Ireland is. The next Pan European multi week dunkelflaut will mean every country in Europe that is reliant on wind - like Germany, Denmark, the Netherlands, Uk, us, etc - will be pleading with the French for every spare watt of nuclear they can get. As it will probably come down to a bidding war, I'm fairly confident that Germany and the Netherlands can handilly outbid us.

As for shutdowns, the mistaken belief is that Ireland could at most justify one reactor, when it could handily take 8 or more. With electrification of transport - EV's - and heating - heat pumps and industry, our energy requirements are going to more than double. The ESB projections are absolutely mind blowing - just for energy storage it's a trillion Tesla Powerwalls or 2 Hiroshima sized nuclear weapons worth of stored Hydrogen. You've seen the 'history of hydrogen' gag in 'The Martian'? It's Ironic people use Fukashima as a nuclear scare story when it was a hydrogen explosion that blew it up (thanks to Sabine Hossenfelder for pointing that out).

So yes, a reactor shutdown would be problematic if you just had one, so we build at least 6+, and if we are smart, one extra to export via the white elephant when the wind reliants are begging for ergs and to make hydrogen when they are not - for transport, making fertiliser (ammonia) to replace that we import. The French are so dumb with their nuclear they earn enough from energy exports to build a new reactor every 3 years.

It is a Nuclear for Ireland thread. That topic has almost never been discussed because of non-stop anti renewable diatribe.

If you are about to get banned from a thread opened just for you, then look in the mirror bro!

36bn is pennies, people have up to about 145bn euro in savings at this moment in time, so not sure how Ireland is classified as poor.

Whole bunch of societal failures resulting in large amounts of the country's wealth being in stuff that has little utility to the people living here (aircraft being a great example)

For full disclosure, I've always worked for multinational companies that invest heavily in Ireland. They do bring wealth and jobs to the country, but we're hooked on their tax revenue like an addict mainlining heroin

Couple that with a property market which is trickling out houses just enough to keep the price where they want it, plus just general high cost of living issues and you end up with the richest country in the world by GDP per capita somehow having a housing crisis and a whole generation of disillusioned people who don't see a future worth working towards

Asking prices for houses in Dublin went up by something like €25k last year. So for someone saving €2k a month after rent then you've literally just lost an entire year of saving up for a deposit

Easy to see then why people check out of the whole process and just give up

Anyway.... sorry for the rant, trains are good, we need more of them

treating an interconnector as an import-only instrument to make your point isn’t particularly fair, since exporting of excess wind&solar is also possible, thereby improving the business case.

We've already seen the French nuclear fleet creaking the past two summers with shutdowns and high loads for A/C, etc., and that fleet is not getting any younger. It's actually quite conceivable that with a combination of much larger volumes of wind/solar/storage in Ireland over coming years that we could be selling into Europe at their peak prices. Not saying we're at that point yet but to compare it to Stork in the 60's is ridiculous, the opportunity in front of us is more like MNC's in the 80's if we're smart enough to grasp it.

have a system installed 2 years, it has tripped the emergency switch twice now in a month. I will get on to the installer tomorrow but anyone got an idea of what can cause this?

Thinking about it nothing has tripped. the breaker is still up. the last time, turning the rotary isolator switch next to the inverter off , and back on again a few minutes worked. there was no fault logged in inverter logs. This time, that hasn't worked yet. will try isolating the panels. tried that, makes no difference. inverter won't come on. light on projoy fireman switch blinking, will look into that..