Nationwide Smoky Coal Ban In Effect From Today

http://www.irishtimes.com/news/environment/nationwide-ban-on-smoky-coal-to-apply-from-autumn-2016-1.2369653

About bloody time too, the clouds of coal smoke in my Village most of the year is disgusting ! Really hard on my sinus and it will be nice not to have black windows and clean out the air purifier so often !

The sad thing is you can still burn Turf and briquettes which is just as bad !!!

Still a welcome development for Irish small towns and villages but not enough !

Question is will this coal be illegal to sell because I know people in my village will laugh at this ban ?

bk

It is great news and long overdue. Unfortunately it doesn't come into effect until Autumn 2018!!

http://www.rte.ie/news/2015/0928/730807-smokey-coal/

Also we need to pressure Northern Ireland to follow suit or you will end up with people sneaking across the border to buy smoky coal.

Final problem is it still allows for the terrible burning of peat, etc.

A small, but important step in the right direction.

We also need to shut down Moneypoint and the remaining peat burning plants. Finally we need, to work on moving to Electric cars and get away from the horrible Diesel cars.

They should ban solid fuels full stop.

2018 is Bull crap, it's okay for people in larger towns to have better air quality the last few years why aren't I entitled to the same air quality ?

The problem is people themselves bury their heads in the sand and couldn't care less what they breath in.

I wouldn't even dream of burning solid fuels !

mugsyy

its a bit of a joke to be honest and poorly thought out.
domestic burning of solid fuels accounts for a very small percentage of emissions in this country - the vast majority come from coal and peat burning power stations. The big question we should be asking is does the ban on smoky coal extend to the power stations. If not, this is only a token gesture and although it will lead to slight air quality improvements the gains will be small.
And in my opinion there is no chance of the North following suit so they have opened the door to another 'black' market for coal

_Brian

I suspect there will be an additional cost as the "fuel allowance" on SW will now provide less heat to the OAPs and others receiving it.
I think of my mam who burns coal in her stove. This will add significant cost to her annual heating costs.

And as for the turf burning stations. They have an agreement with the government that we must buy electricity from them going forward. Thus wind turbines lie idle while these dinasors burn up our bogs. Unions at their best.

mugsyy

mugsyy wrote: »

its a bit of a joke to be honest and poorly thought out.
domestic burning of solid fuels accounts for a very small percentage of emissions in this country - the vast majority come from coal and peat burning power stations. The big question we should be asking is does the ban on smoky coal extend to the power stations. If not, this is only a token gesture and although it will lead to slight air quality improvements the gains will be small.
And in my opinion there is no chance of the North following suit so they have opened the door to another 'black' market for coal

Well I live under a cloud of coal smoke in my village and I really would welcome this ban ASAP. It effects my Sinus badly.

And there are significant numbers of homes in Ireland burning Coal.

Power stations should also be phased out that burn coal and peat. Peat is also a horrid fuel to bun I hate the stink of it.

Usual people are not in direct contact with this smoke like they are in towns and villages.

machiavellianme

Deleted User wrote: »

Well I live under a cloud of coal smoke in my village and I really would welcome this ban ASAP. It effects my Sinus badly.

And there are significant numbers of homes in Ireland burning Coal.

Power stations should also be phased out that burn coal and peat. Peat is also a horrid fuel to bun I hate the stink of it.

Usual people are not in direct contact with this smoke like they are in towns and villages.

And what will they burn instead? Bunny rabbits (like in Sweden)?
We are already over reliant on gas for electricity generation and at the end of a very long pipeline, with no indigenous fuel of note as an alternative.

2forjoy

Get rid of the power station in Co. Clare and the carbon footprint will be halved immediately .

It burns 2 million tonnes of coal each year

newacc2015

machiavellianme wrote: »

And what will they burn instead? Bunny rabbits (like in Sweden)?
We are already over reliant on gas for electricity generation and at the end of a very long pipeline, with no indigenous fuel of note as an alternative.

Gas burns clean though. There is no soot from it. The ESB station at Bull Wall Generates roughly 20% of Irelands Electricity. Yet there is no smell or soot from it.

Although Coal is ridiculously cheap at the moment. Its basically being dumped as the US is producing huge amounts of it. Yet its not using it due to the fracking gas being so cheap too. Chinas demand for coal is falling. Meaning you can buy coal commercially pretty cheapily. If we are going to go entirely renewable. Stop burning peat and burn cheap coal instead.

2forjoy

newacc2015 wrote: »

Gas burns clean though. There is no soot from it. The ESB station at Bull Wall Generates roughly 20% of Irelands Electricity. Yet there is no smell or soot from it.

Although Coal is ridiculously cheap at the moment. Its basically being dumped as the US is producing huge amounts of it. Yet its not using it due to the fracking gas being so cheap too. Chinas demand for coal is falling. Meaning you can buy coal commercially pretty cheapily. If we are going to go entirely renewable. Stop burning peat and burn cheap coal instead.

I dont think you could go entirely renewable and burn cheap coal

machiavellianme

newacc2015 wrote: »

Gas burns clean though. There is no soot from it. The ESB station at Bull Wall Generates roughly 20% of Irelands Electricity. Yet there is no smell or soot from it.

Although Coal is ridiculously cheap at the moment. Its basically being dumped as the US is producing huge amounts of it. Yet its not using it due to the fracking gas being so cheap too. Chinas demand for coal is falling. Meaning you can buy coal commercially pretty cheapily. If we are going to go entirely renewable. Stop burning peat and burn cheap coal instead.

No it doesn't. Dublin Bay combined cycle gas turbine is a 400 MW unit. The minimum demand in Ireland is over 2GW. Therefore, even if it ran at full load 24/7,which it doesn't, it wouldn't provide 20% of irelands electricity at any instant, nevermind when the load is closer to 5GW. Having a mix of fuel is good for security of supply, you aren't dependent on a single one, which is susceptible to fluctuate in price or availability. If the Russians turn off the gas, what do we do? Pray for wind? Without coal or peat there wouldn't be much else.

Capt'n Midnight

machiavellianme wrote: »

If the Russians turn off the gas, what do we do? Pray for wind? Without coal or peat there wouldn't be much else.

We'd just keep using Norwegian gas.

Even Lithuania is importing LNG from the USA to reduce dependence on Russia.

Wind and Solar PV, we need much more solar PV in Ireland, it does work.

Wind can generate up to 40% of our electricity demands , currently meeting 14% of 3.7 GW, solar can greatly add to the mix when wind production is low, and solar is cheap compared to turbines with no maintenance.

I say wind offshore and solar on land, solar does work.

machiavellianme

Solar takes approximately 5 acres per 1MW of electricity. That's a lot of land to replace a moneypoint unit.
Sure it'll work to a degree. Less efficient on cloudy days, no use over the evening peak in winter. It has its place, but not at the top of the merit order in Ireland.

Capt'n Midnight

machiavellianme wrote: »

Solar takes approximately 5 acres per 1MW of electricity. That's a lot of land to replace a moneypoint unit.
Sure it'll work to a degree. Less efficient on cloudy days, no use over the evening peak in winter. It has its place, but not at the top of the merit order in Ireland.

5 acres per MW you say ?
we could get 25GW from Bord Na Móna's bogs alone.

Note:
http://www.bordnamona.ie/news/latest/bord-na-mona-announces-biggest-change-of-land-use-in-modern-irish-history/

Bord na Móna is announcing the biggest change of use involving Irish land in modern history. 125,000 acres of bogland that are now being used to provide energy peat to three powerstations will transition to new uses by 2030. After 2030 the company will no longer harvest energy peat and will have completed its move to new sustainable businesses, located across its bogs and landholding. The move will involve the rehabilitation of tens of thousands of acres of Irish bogs providing new biodiverse habitats that can also support new eco-tourism and community amenity resources.

Was in Italy a while back and the number of farms with barns and sheds covered in solar panels was amazing. There's a lot of unproductive surface area in this country. If you could put panels on stilts you could fit a lot on Sandymount strand.

Macha

Exactly. And it can reduce costs to have solar where the demand is, reducing the transmission costs and losses.

Solar PV does work in Ireland and the solar calculators will back this up based on the average solar data for Ireland.

I would need about 9 KwP to power my house and Nissal Leaf EV for the year, only problem in Ireland is you need to feed to the grid but we have no feed in tariff but I believe this is to change next year ? and most Irish homes are single phase only meaning you can send only 5.5 kw max to the grid, still that would make a huge difference.

I see a huge amount of Solar PV on roof tops in Germany and my Partners's parents have 14 Kwp but German houses are usually much bigger than Irish houses and have the roof space.

But their array can generate over 70 kwh per a good sunny day in Summer, they send to the grid all this excess and buy back in Winter to run the storage heaters. This is why you need grid systems because you'll generate far more in Summer than you can use and can't store it for winter.

bk

machiavellianme wrote: »

And what will they burn instead? Bunny rabbits (like in Sweden)?
We are already over reliant on gas for electricity generation and at the end of a very long pipeline, with no indigenous fuel of note as an alternative.

Yes, in the short to medium term we use more gas.

Gas while not perfect, is FAR cleaner then coal and in particular peat/oil which are terribly dirty.

And no our gas doesn't from very long pipelines, it comes from Cork and Norway (via Scotland). Norway really isn't very far when it comes to these sort of things.

BTW only about 11% of our electricity comes from Peat and coal (22%) certainly isn't native, it is shipped in from the US, much further then Norway!

Natural Gas already makes up 48% of our fuel mix (2013), by far the most. But interestingly this is down 55% in 2011 (when we also used more power). Mostly this drop is down to increasing wind, biomass and imports (mostly UK Nuclear power), with coal and peat staying largely stable.

If you look at this drop, of 400 ktoe in 2 years, you can see that we could replace all of the remaining oil and almost all peat with this 400 ktoe, without building a single new gas power station!

You could also convert some of the peat plants to biomass if you wanted.

That just leaves Moneypoints 900ktoe of coal fired power to deal with. The best solution there would seem to be to convert to biomass, which is recognised as a renewable source.

Of course those are short to medium term goals. In the long term you want to use gas as a cleaner stopgap while we dial up wind, solar PV, wave and more inter-connectors to British and French Nuclear and thus dial down the dependence on gas.

Capt'n Midnight

bk wrote: »

Of course those are short to medium term goals. In the long term you want to use gas as a cleaner stopgap while we dial up wind, solar PV, wave and more inter-connectors to British and French Nuclear and thus dial down the dependence on gas.

Except of course neither Britain nor France have built a nuke for ages and both are moving to renewables. Britain is a nett importer of power too.

But gas plants have shorter lives than most other generators and most of the costs are for fuel so it's not like gas requires the same sort of long term investment that nuclear, hydro, tidal or pumped storage do. While wind isn't cheap to build , it is very cheap to refurbish compared to most other generators other than hydro, and there is a good market for second hand turbines abroad. Most of the economics for wind are based on a 20 year life when it could easily be doubled.

Refurbishing for nuclear in a lot of cases means fixing design or construction flaws and/or updating to current safety standards rather than just replacing parts at their service interval. Overruns in time and cost are frequent as is finding out the reactor was in a worse state than had been anticipated.

Projects I'd like to see
NI building that CAES plant in the salt mines.
Tidal turbines in NI.
Welsh tidal lagoon.
Scotland Norway interconnector.

Energy to gas.

BTW
Latest solar news is that they've made rectennas. So possibly at some distant stage in the future 40% conversion efficiency. you see that's the thing with renewables , unlike nuclear there many potentially game changing technologies that have been proven in the lab.
http://spectrum.ieee.org/nanoclast/semiconductors/materials/optical-rectenna-could-doube-solar-cell-efficiency

“We could ultimately make solar cells that are twice as efficient at a cost that is ten times lower, and that is to me an opportunity to change the world in a very big way,” said Cola. “As a robust, high-temperature detector, these rectennas could be a completely disruptive technology if we can get to one percent efficiency. If we can get to higher efficiencies, we could apply it to energy conversion technologies and solar energy capture.”

bk

Capt'n Midnight wrote: »

Except of course neither Britain nor France have built a nuke for ages and both are moving to renewables. Britain is a nett importer of power too.

Really!!

France is currently building a new 1600 MWe reactor unit at Flamanville

UK planning to build two new 1,600 MWe reactor units at Hinkley

France already gets over 75% of it's electricity from Nuclear, has one of the lowest electricity prices in the world, one of the lowest CO2 emissions in the Western World and is the largest exporter of electricity in the world.

And don't kid yourself, the Ireland - England 500MWe inter-connector is pretty much plugged directly into the 490MW Wylfa Nuclear Power Station. Almost all power that comes to Ireland from that interconnector is coming from that Nuclear power station.

And when you say that the UK is a net importer, what you mean is that they are importing large amounts of cheap French Nuclear power, which we are in turn import via England and Scotland.

I agree with you I really hope that they build the high capacity Scotland - Norway interconnector and that we plug into that by increasing our interconnector with Scotland, thus importing lots more of that lovely cheap, abundant, zero CO2, Norwegian hydro power.

But we shouldn't kid ourselves, Nuclear power plays a significant part in Irelands electricity fuel mix. We are such hypocrites.

Capt'n Midnight

bk wrote: »

Really!!

France is currently building a new 1600 MWe reactor unit at Flamanville

UK planning to build two new 1,600 MWe reactor units at Hinkley

France already gets over 75% of it's electricity from Nuclear, has one of the lowest electricity prices in the world, one of the lowest CO2 emissions in the Western World and is the largest exporter of electricity in the world.

They are EPR's. The construction on the Finnish one started back in 2005. None of them are expected to generate power for years, 2018 at the earliest and if you believe that you might be interested in this bridge I have for sale. If you've been following the news you'd also have heard of the quality problems with the level of carbon in the pressure vessel's steel.

Also the France 75% thing is getting very tired when they've already committed to reduce that to 50% within the next ten years, which is less time that it's taking to build the precious EPR's.

And don't kid yourself, the Ireland - England 500MWe inter-connector is pretty much plugged directly into the 490MW Wylfa Nuclear Power Station. Almost all power that comes to Ireland from that interconnector is coming from that Nuclear power station.

Wylfa is due to shut down for decommissioning on 31st of December. And that's the last of the Magnox reactors off the grid, forever.

Also suggest you check the eirgrid stats on the interconnector. Power goes both ways. http://smartgriddashboard.eirgrid.com/#all/interconnection

But we shouldn't kid ourselves, Nuclear power plays a significant part in Irelands electricity fuel mix. We are such hypocrites.

Even the UK got slightly more energy from renewables than Nuclear last year.
https://www.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/416310/PN_March_15.pdf

Renewables’ share of electricity generation was a record 19.2 per cent in 2014, ...
Nuclear’s share of generation decreased by
0.6 percentage points on 2013, to 19.0 per cent of the total due to outages in the second half of the year.

JCX BXC

bk wrote: »

coal (22%) certainly isn't native, it is shipped in from the US, much further then Norway!
.

Columbia actually in the case of Moneypoint!