Spirit of Ireland - A bright spark in today's economic gloom?

weepee wrote: »

Its an interesting concept, tho an expensive one. The major stumbling block would be the political issues and planning laws Id say.

Their major stumbling block is the technical and financial feasibility of the thing. Anyone with some expertise in the area who has looked at this proposal has described it as a fantasy.

Their technical estimates are wildly optimistic (back of the envelope calculations I have done show they have significantly underestimated the necessary power outputs), their building schedule (about 5 years) is from la la land, and their grasp of the finance and economics is laughable (the cost per generated kwh is so high that we would never get a buyer for the power).

The powers that be aren't stupid, and they know this is a crack pot scheme. And that is why it is politely being ignored, and will in time join the ranks of other daft schemes we avoid from Steorn's "free" energy, to the periodically proposed tunnel under the Irish sea.

zod wrote: »

Tell me what do you suggest we do?, the costs could look cheap compared to oil in a few years time, not to mention the impending global warming.

Or do you think that the end of the oil economy and global warming are "crack pot schemes" also ?

Oh I know we will be replacing oil in years to come. And wind will be part of the solution. But I, and anyone I have talked to who works in the wind power industry, will tell you that we are never going to convert the entire Irish power generating capabilty to wind, and have a tidy surplus to sell, which is the utopia Spirit of Ireland are peddling.

And we will certainly not end up like later day Saudis, wealthy on the revenues from exported wind energy.

I wouldn't be at all surprised, if I was still here in a hundred years' time, to see the western seaboard dotted with windmills and hydro storage. What I would like to see happen is for the scheme to gradually build up to a national level, as more individual parts are added to it. No need for huge multi-billion all-at-once projects, what's the point? Just one piece at a time and then on to the next one as it becomes necessary.
There is nothing more certain than that we WILL run out of oil at some point and we'd better have something in place or we'll all be going back to the oil-lamp; oh wait, they need oil too, and we've already run out of whales.
I suppose the chippers of Ireland will do a roaring trade selling their old chip oil for candles.

Вашему собственному бычьему дерьму нельзя верить - V Putin

sliabh wrote: »

Their major stumbling block is the technical and financial feasibility of the thing. Anyone with some expertise in the area who has looked at this proposal has described it as a fantasy.

Their technical estimates are wildly optimistic (back of the envelope calculations I have done show they have significantly underestimated the necessary power outputs), their building schedule (about 5 years) is from la la land, and their grasp of the finance and economics is laughable (the cost per generated kwh is so high that we would never get a buyer for the power).

The powers that be aren\\\'t stupid, and they know this is a crack pot scheme. And that is why it is politely being ignored, and will in time join the ranks of other daft schemes we avoid from Steorn\\\'s \\\"free\\\" energy, to the periodically proposed tunnel under the Irish sea.

Care to elaborate, who has described this proposal as Fantasy? I have not seen one report in the media, or head of anyone describe this idea as Fantasy

Care to show us your back of the envelope calculations, underestimated the necessary power outputs of what,
Are you talking about the average demand, peak demand, turbine output, storage capacity, output of the hydro turbines?

I ask becasue my back of the envelope calcs show this to be feasible.
Assuming a 3GWh average daily consumption if you have 2500 turbines a 3MW each that gives 7.5GW, so assumes that you need to gerarate at 40% capacity.
Seams realistic to me

Is 3GW a good average, the peak yesterday was 3.5GW and in the Winter the peak is approx 5GW and the average does look to be about 3GW

So the other questions can we store 500GWh, i.e enough to power the country for a week, acording to SOI they have identified up to 50 sites of over 100GWh capacity so aparently yes.

as for the time frame, yes its optomistic but the biggest delay would be planning, say 2 years. then is 3 years constructino possibleWhitlee wind farm , 140 turbines took 3 years to construct. That was buy one company, you could have 5-8 companies building similar windfarms concurrently and that would give you so to build 2000 turbines, you are probably talking 6 years.

definately can do it in under 10

cost per GWh, they are talking about 6-7 c per kWh, which is a very resonable price.

Also remember we have to have 20% of our electricity supplied by renewables so we do have to build the windfarms anyway, unless we go with wave or tidal, both of which are immature technologies or maybe Solar thermal.

sliabh wrote: »

As I mentioned above, I have said (and done a lot of the numbers) in this before. You are free to go and look at them.

But there is a problem here in that people are putting the cart before the horse. It is not for me to disprove this scheme, it is for SoI to prove that it is viable. They have yet to do so.

To the best of my knowledge, althrough we are several months down the line form their initial publicity fanfare, they have yet to provide us with a look at their costings, or any real detail on the technical side of their plans.

The onus remains on SoI to make their case. But even until they do, just applying a simple BS test can give you an idea of whether or not they are on to something.

Consider which you think is more likely?

A) A group of people with a limited background in the area of wind and pumped storage power have managed to come up with an amazing scheme to make Ireland energy independent, and buckets of cash to boot. And despite the fact that this is supposed to be based on using existing technology, none of the acknowledged experts in the field, or the companies that spend all their time trying to think up ways to making money from wind energy, have suggested this idea before.

Following some conversations in a pub, and scribblings on the back of a beer mat some people slapped up a flash website, issued a press release full of hope and far-away-hills optimism to a receptive public desperate for any good news in the midst of the worst recession in 80 years, but now find that in the cold light of day their extravagent claims don\\\'t actually stack up.

I know which one I am going for.

I had a look and I found one link you posted to Philip walton\\\'s letter to the times where he used very selective figures, e.g. a penstock height of 20m where as SOI propose 200m.

Many other contributors have questioned Dr Waltons impartionality.

As for your calculation the only on I can see is about the land required where you have it varying from approx, 2500km2 to 3500km2, though another contributor has it at 750km2, whcih would be close to the 1% figure the SOI have aparently mentioned

However I would caution the map you have used to justify the average figure of 5km/h winds. Wind speed vary differently along the coast it would be veryimportant to know the varyance of the wind speed along that coast.

So it may be possible to position the turbines in sites of higher tha average windspeed.

SOI also propose to put the turbines up in Marginal Land. I know from visiting windfarms that sheep can still graze aroung the windfarms.

While I agree it is for the SOI to prove their figures you might want to wait for them to publish them, before calling them fantasy

Finially the SOI of Ireland group are hardly some bunch of lads down the pub, from what I can see the do appear to be a group of well qualified individuals who have consulted external experts

sliabh wrote: »

I have been waiting...

Eventually you have to just say the Emperor has no clothes.

They are planning to publish a full technical proposal in Mid September.

I have come up with a fair few good ideas in my time, only to discover on investigation that the reason everyone isn't following them is they weren't actually that good in practice.

I will leave my final word to Carl Sagan: "They laughed at Columbus, they laughed at Fulton, they laughed at the Wright Brothers. But they also laughed at Bozo the Clown."

Hi everyone
I think it is time to bring you up to speed with how the Spirit of Ireland has progressed from the start of the summer to the now.

we have completed a huge amount of work to turn this project into a reality and will be presenting the results of this work to the public at end of September, but here is a very brief synopsis.

We have identified the area in the west of Ireland where it is likely our first natural energy power station will be located and as promised are presently consulting the local people and landowners with no negative views expressed to date, in fact the community are at present organising their windfarm Co op.

The technical modelling of this site has been quite extensive and in fact allows us to say that we will be building the first large scale natural energy power station in the world,

We are in the latter stages of our discussions with the wind turbine manufacturers and are quite hopeful that within weeks we can put a definate FDI project on the table.

Our estimate now on the amount of jobs that will be created during construction and the ongoing jobs resulting from phase one will be in the order of 15,000, spread across the whole range of employments from construction to accounting and on to engineering.

We have defined the environmental cost of the project and are consulting with the relevant bodies on the best way forward on this subject.

The project was begun as a way to fix the wind and the result has turned into a genuine world first, a large scale natural energy power station, so how does it work.

Some months ago it was very correctly pointed out that the problem with wind energy was the load factor, that is the amount of the time that the wind is blowing. In Ireland the average load factor is between 30 and 40%, with some parts of the country capable of exceeding 40% with optimum blade selection. The average load factor for mainland Europe is between 20 and 30%, that may not seem a huge difference but in practice our wind resource is 25% higher than most of Europe but it is still intermittant and could not be considered in the same way as a conventional power station, but add a large amount of pumped storage and that changes totally.

Assuming that we have filled the reservoir to about 60% capacity before we begin, the energy generated by our wind farms passes the front door of the power station where it is measured, if it is greater than 1 GW, a percentage is removed and fed to the turbines to pump more water into the reservoir and the 1 Gw is passed to the grid, note that no energy is wasted, if the wind drops at the windfarm, the turbines run in generator mode to make up the difference in energy so that the output is still 1 GW. In actual practice there will be times when the windspeed is low for a long period of hours, the met records in the area likely to be our first natural energy power station show that the longest such period in the last 2 years was 13 hours, no matter, we have plenty of energy in the reservoir, so then all ten turbines run and the output is still 1 GW.

I think you can agree that we have a 1GW natural energy power station, with no carbon emissions

One gigawatt is 20% of our peak electrical demand and 33% of summer demand.

Any questions ?

Roryhy wrote: »

it's a great project, would really like to see this one happen. would also like to see the figure for buying the land and construction of the reservoir, this project needs to make financial and not just environmental sense to progress. i hope we can use this to realise the countries natural energy potential and set a great example to the international community

We are very fortunate that nature has done most of the work for us and so we can have these reservoirs at a fraction of what they might cost elsewhere, We have costed the pumped hydro units at €800 million each and we are talking to the landowners at present, however land acquisition costs are almost incidental, we are discussing some of the most marginal and disadvantaged land in Europe, and we only need about two sguare km. The important point here we believe is to to increase the long term earning potential for the landowners rather than a relatively insignificant once off payment.

any hints on the site, i'd like to take a look on google?

zod wrote: »

Pat, have you proposed that the Government create a pension fund that can invest in this ?

1. If Irish people were allowed to invest their pensions in this I'd imagine there would be a huge amount of monies made available and quickly.

2. This would allow Irish people to invest their pensions in their own country .. I know many who search out similar projects in other countries (Spain - solar) where the government there guarantees a minimum return.

zod
you raise a very interesting point here in that when first presented with the overall cost of this project €10.5 billion, many people gasp and tell us that finding that kind of money is impossible. In actual fact raising the money will not, we believe be all that difficult at all, we have had discussions with the ECB, investment funds, ethical investment funds, sovereign wealth funds, and finally the nub of your question, pension funds and all have expressed a wish to fund this project.
Two important points to make here, S of I are only interested in long term money at utility interest rates.
And the second point is that we wish that Irish people benefit to the largest extent possible, which is why we wish to run the project as a national co operative.
So in effect Irish people will have two ways to invest, as a co op shareholder and through their pension funds