Energy infrastructure

The energy credits come out of our taxes and are yet another subsidy for price gouging energy companies and the wind scam

Highest energy bills in the EU is not that easy to calculate, it is wrong. There's a graph showing Ireland at something mental like 48c/kWh, nobody paying that.

Been paying 30c this last year and going to get a better deal this week.

Huh? If want to go down the route of calling things false - What do you mean you have to make €1 million p.a. to cover a €450 credit out of your own tax contributions?

Someone on €1 million will contribute many multiples of that €450 since their tax liability after personal credit is still €387,850. That's before they buy a single item that is VAT eligible. Heck anyone who pays a total of €1960 for goods at the top VAT rate over the year will cover the €450 credit. Anyone making over €21k per annum will pay at least €450 on income tax alone.

While it's unlikely that the full extent of someone's tax contributions go directly towards their own personal services (including energy credit), it's not impossible. But the same can be said of anything funded from the public purse. You didn't pay for the road directly to your house or the school where you were educated or the Garda who polices your area. All general taxation covers these things. So it's hardly unforgivable for Birdnuts to use the royal "we" is it? Or are you sticking to him/her needing to earn at least €1 million to cover it (and even then, it might be wasted on providing services for others rather than themselves)?

Yes, energy independence. We are an island; our electricity grid extends no further than the shores of this island. In terms of drawing power from neighbouring generators, or exporting surplus power, we are limited by DC Interconnector capacity

Yes, our electricity cost are high, but I cannot see why you keep blaming wind energy for this fact. Our electricity costs were high when all we did was burn fossil fuels. The prices are due to reduced economies of scale and our inability to pool fallback strategies with our neighbours. This small scale makes our like-for-like generation costs higher than in neighbouring countries: it is often cheaper to import gas-sourced electricity from the UK than to generate it ourself. (The UK, in turn, sees the same phenomenon with respect to the continental grid).

You can keep framing this basic truth as the government attacking your liberties, but it's a fundamental cost of living in a relatively small and isolated electricity market. More interconnectivity will help, but without electricity to sell at peak times, interconnectors won't get our prices down. Every country in Europe with "cheap" electricity has a positive balance of trade in energy (i.e., they export more than they consume domestically); we have a negative balance. That's why we are investing so heavily in renewables: we will eventually become an exporter of electricity, and it is that shift in trade that will lower our prices.

But even if it is lower, the PSO levy will still be around, because we will still be an island nation.

encryption at any point between source and destination is taking up a lot more CPU cycles especially as key lengths increase.

What used to be a trivial consumer of CPU processing power has become quite large. I have had to look at some of our hosts and figure out why they are so much bigger than they used to be a couple of years ago.

You've a couple of misconceptions there. The first is about grids, the second about when market pricing becomes a factor.

The defintion of an electricity grid is an area that is synchronised to the same AC frequency. lnterconnectors have that name because they connect between grids. Our grid extends no further than this island (and yes, if you are pedantic, the few thousands of connections on our offshore islands).

This is important because there is a huge cost difference between building DC interconnects and simply connecting synchronous AC sources to loads. The latter, however it's not an option because we're an island. As is GB, and that is why they, like us, are not part of the European grid. This is why the electricity grids in Ireland and the UK are divided on geographical, not national, lines. AC in Belfast is synchronous with Bantry, not Ayr.

You've answered your own question on the second part. We still import at times of wind because our demand for power is higher than we can supply locally at those times. At times like this, all of our wind is being used right here, so our choice to make up the shortfall is to either fire up gas "peaking" generators in Ireland or buy in electricity from GB. That's where the market pricing comes in. Because of economies of scale and access to fuel, the GB grid can almost always send us gas-sourced electricity cheaper than we can make it ourself.

Storms aside, we never curtail wind generation in favour of buying in electricity from abroad. We normally use all the wind we can produce. Only in periods of strong wind and low domestic demand do we export wind energy.

To get out of the net-importer situation that keeps our prices high, we need to add generation to our grid. For the scale of extra generation we need, our options are basically to use fossil fuels, nuclear, or wind/solar. Fossil fuels put us in the pocket of unstable regimes (with the sole and honourable exception of Norway), and, as noted above, fossil generation here is not cost-competitive: our small economies of scale and remoteness would make it more economical for us to build a gas plant within the GB grid and import from that, rather than build the same plant here (that's a crazy idea for other reasons, though). Nuclear has the same pricing problem, plus all the other public opposition and cost uncertainty that surrounds nuclear power.

Basically, wind and solar are the only options for which we don't incur a fuel import penalty…it doesn't matter that we have to buy in the gear - that's true of every kind of generation we could choose. What matters is that once we have that equipment built, generation has no further input costs. Wind is also the only type of generation where our remoteness gives us an enormous resource: we get to harvest the wind energy produced by the North Atlantic ocean. Wind isn't steady-state, though, so building to meet our own requirements means an overspec system that will often result in large surpluses, and it's by selling those surpluses (either directly, or following energy storage) that we will become a net exporter: our surplus wind power will be cheaper per megawatt than neighbouring nations' fossil power.

If you look at the countries that are large exporters of electricity, it is mostly renewable energy that they export, not nuclear or fossil power.

I'm assuming the pumping and gas compression appliances would all have to be changed out , hydrogen needs to be at far higher pressures than nat gas , to have the same energy for a given volume,

How wise is it to try put hydrogen in an old natural gas well ,

You'd have to compress the hydrogen to get it out to the well and inject it .. and it'd need to be compressed again as it exits the well , if it could be relied upon to be available, it's going to seep through rock , and depending on the rock type ,how much natural cracking there is and the extent of fracking that's been carried out .. there may not be an available reservoir,

To start with , renewable energy isnt cheap in Ireland,

Large scale Hydrogen electrolysis is in its infancy , and compressing the hydrogen has a significant energy cost, the storage , recompression,transmission is then another significant cost .

Leakage because of storing already expensive hydrogen in an underground nat gas Well ,it's a bit bonkers

I think you have a misconception about grids. Making up a definition doesn't make you right. For example, the national grid in Japan has two different AC frequencies, interconnected using HVDC. Do you want to go tell them they in fact don't have a grid because you made up some new definition?

We have an AC synchronous area on the island of Ireland (as per the LFCBOA). We are connected to another AC synchronous area via HVDC, those connections individually constitute tailed connections but together make the Irish and GB systems meshed grids. For example, if a significant fault happens in Continental Europe, the GB system will respond and it's frequency will dip based on the setpoints of the Channel interconnectors. After the frequency reaches 49.8Hz there, our interconnectors will also respond and the Irish frequency will also reduce. The only difference if it was AC is that the response would be instantaneous through the electromagnetic coupling (inertia etc) whereas the HVDC controllers allow for setpoints to be reached before there's a response.

There have been several instances where a fault in Europe has impacted on the Irish power system. The most recent being a fault on the IFA interconnector between GB and France. If the all-island synchronous area isn't part of the grid, how did this happen?

Heck, even Wiki describes it better than you. The first line alone says that "An electrical grid (or electricity network) is an interconnected network for electricity delivery from producers to consumers.".

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electrical_grid

I won't even comment on your ignorance of the market. We regularly see imports during high wind and, get this, we actually curtail or spill indigenous wind generation to do so. It is nothing to do with not having sufficient generation on the island but everything to do with market rules and simple economics.

If you take your own advice and look at the net exporters of electricity, instead of fabricating lies, you'll see that the 3 largest net exporters are France, Sweden and Norway. France is dominated by nuclear and the Scandinavian countries have immense hydro reserves (conventional plant, not asynchronous intermittent rubbish like wind) along with some nuclear. See

https://www.powerengineeringint.com/world-regions/europe/france-tops-europes-net-power-export-chart/

Sorry but most of that is rubbish - our energy costs were below the EU average prior to significant wind energy expansion 25 years ago. Now we are at the top of the league in terms of costs. Plus you appear to be unaware of the number of interconnectors existing and planned to shore up the energy demand here using French nuclear etc.

Throwing Wikipedia links around doesn't help if you don't understand what they say. The key words are "synchronous area", and it's not my definition, it's the one the entire electricity industry uses. Unless otherwise qualified, "grid" means "synchronous AC transmission network". And that's not my rule either.

Japan has not one, but four synchonous electricity grids. It's not even "one grid" for commercial purposes, as there are different regional power companies that manage them. Japan uses DC interconnectors at the edges of these grids within its national territory, but things would have been a lot cheaper and easier if the nation's generation companies had standardised on one voltage and frequency from the outset. Interconnectors are the most expensive way to transmit electrical power, and they can become bottlenecks.

Historic wind curtailment was due to a limit on how much wind energy could be taken in to the grid. The Moneypoint synchronous condensor and other support infrastructure means that this limit has been raised to a point where it's not likely to be reached often in the near term.

France does not export nuclear power - this is debunked about once a month on this forum, and the daily graphs will show you that. If your nuclear creates consistent surpluses you have wasted your money (stop looking at the market from just the consumer side and look at the producer's economics). Sweden exports mostly wind and Norway does indeed export hydro, but hydro is renewable energy and Norway also exports wind energy (10% of Norway's domestic electricity was from wind in 2023).

"State grids" is a meaningless term. Japan is a state with four electricity grids, the UK is a state with two. The USA has three (one of which is just for Texas, because Texas), and most European states share a single grid between them.

And I have a "road map", but it shows more than one road on it.

Here's the trend of household electricity pricing since 2007:

Can anyone, using this graph alone, identify the points where wind power exceeded 5%, 10% or 20% of Ireland's energy production?

If there is a correlation between wind energy and energy cost, it should be clearly visible as a trend here.

("EA" = Eurozone; This graph uses Purchasing Power Standard pricing, which accounts for the difference in purchasing power of €1 between member states. Each bar represents a 6 month period, but the last four bars are distorted by the timing of the government's electricity credits - Source: https://www.seai.ie/publications/Electricity-Gas-Prices-2023-H1.pdf )

So even after clarifying that I used the word "state" as a verb (to state something) rather than a proper noun (State of Massachusetts), you continue to double down because you clearly have nothing?

To make it super simple for you, please provide a link to a single definition (other than the one you clearly made up) that says grids don't include HVDC and/or they end at the shoreline of an island.

I'm afraid you have that wrong, without AC synchronisation, a generator in one synchronous area can indeed still respond to a demand fluctuation in another synchronous area, providing they are interconnected. The East West interconnector generally follows an Interconnector reference program based on market coupling results but it also routinely adjusts based on frequency measurements in both grids. I already provided an example where Irish generators responded to a fault between England and France. Interconnectors are effectively just a wire with a box of electronics at both ends, so the governors on generators in Ireland respond to the deviation in frequency in Ireland if Ewic increases its exports in response to a fault in GB or further afield.

https://www.current-news.co.uk/ifa-interconnector-fault-causes-49-2hz-frequency-event/

Of course, all of above is based on the current arrangements for HVDC interconnectors in Ireland. They all have a limited frequency sensitivity so as not to deviate for small fluctuations in frequency. That is a controller setting rather than a requirement. HVDC schemes can act as a pseudo-synchronous AC wire if they are in Grid Forming mode, in which case you will see a generator in Ireland suddenly change it's output for a disturbance in the UK or Europe, rather than waiting for the Irish system frequency to fall or rise outside of the Interconnector deadband.

Power on VSC HVDC interconnectors can be adjusted instantaneously. They can have a ramp rate of 9999 MW/s. However in Ireland, Eirgrid limits this to 5 MW/min for system security as set out in the LFC Block Operating Agreement and the Balancing Market Principles Statement. The LFCBOA explicitly states that this ramp rate does not apply for FCR, FRR and RR, ie the reserves provided on the interconnectors (so they can ramp instantly after a fault).

https://cms.eirgrid.ie/sites/default/files/publications/LFC-Block-Proposal-Submission-for-Ireland-and-Northern-Ireland-V2.0-%28for-consultation-post-RfA%29.pdf

https://www.soni.ltd.uk/media/documents/EirGrid-and-SONI-Balancing-Market-Principles-Statement-V8.0.pdf

It's true, older LCC interconnectors cannot adjust as rapidly as they require harmonic filters and reactive compensation to be switched in and out of service while they ramp. That only applies to Moyle. As Ewic, Greenlink and Celtic will all be VSC, they are instantly and automatically adjustable without human intervention based on settings in their controllers.

PS generators don't respond via inertia. They respond via electromagnetic coupling in the first instance and then feedback control loops through their governor. Inertia is the ability to withstand sudden deviations and represents the rotational energy in a spinning mass that keeps it spinning. Inertia does not produce any power to respond to a fault.

Eirgrid seem to consider the Irish grid as separate to other European grids.

https://www.eirgrid.ie/industry/interconnection

"Interconnection connects our grid to neighbouring grids"

"Part of this is connecting the grids of Ireland and Great Britain, and Ireland and mainland Europe through High Voltage Direct Current (HVDC) Interconnection"