"Green" policies are destroying this country

JRant

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/121841354#Comment_121841354

The latest regulations (before the CRU shat the bed again) required some PV installed but even cover the entire roof wouldn't make a dent in the power requirements. Also, every data centre already has lots of batteries installed via UPSs.

roosterman71

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/121842047#Comment_121842047

Link to story

https://www.farmersjournal.ie/news/news/farmers-told-to-switch-off-wind-turbines-over-lack-of-meters-807067

PommieBast

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/121842058#Comment_121842058

All those UPS batteries only last a few minutes. They are there to buy just enough time for either a backup generator to power-up or a clean shutdown.

JRant

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/121842499#Comment_121842499

So no different to a BESS.

JRant

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/121842129#Comment_121842129

Thanks for the link. Looks these are small scale microgenerators, not your typical wind farm. With the delay being on the ESB side to install the 3P metering on the sites. It's unsurprising considering how far behind the ESB are with grid reinforcement programs and updates.

Pa ElGrande

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/121842887#Comment_121842887

The aim behind investors on Battery Energy Storage Systems (BESS) is to create value for shareholders from harvesting price volatility. In short, solar/battery farms can make large profits from the very intermittency which they create. BESS is not for backup. It’s for arbitrage.

JRant

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/121842998#Comment_121842998

I understand that but from a purely technical standpoint they are just rectifiers, inverters, and batteries.

ps200306

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/121803144#Comment_121803144

Looking at the effects of wildfires in Hawaii or massive floods in Pakistan, I fail to see much resilience there, but of course we are somewhat more resilient than a century ago, but that’s a moot point.

I answered this point back on page 1024, but just to furnish some additional quantitative information. The total number of flood fatalities is slightly up in the past fifty years. The number of fatalities per flood event is down. The most striking fact is that flood fatalities in middle income countries is sharply down, while in higher income countries it has been low for a long time. It's the economic basket cases like Pakistan that suffer the most. The best protection against climate change (especially since we're doing nothing very substantial to fix it) is increasing affluence.

https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11069-024-06444-0?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email

Floods are the most frequent natural disasters up to 1000 fatalities, and flash floods lead to the highest mortality fractions per event, i.e. the number of deaths in an event relative to the exposed population. Despite population growth and increasing flood hazards, the average number of fatalities per event has declined over time. Mortality fractions per event have decreased over time for middle- and high-middle-income countries, but increased for low-income countries. This highlights the importance of continuing and expanding risk reduction and adaptation efforts.

...

Floods have become less lethal over time in many regions. Especially middle-income countries have succeeded in reducing mortality from flooding, while low-income countries have witnessed an increase after the year 2000. For high-income groups, we find no trend. In both cases, potential explanations may be the increased exposure in the floodplains. In low-income countries, people are increasingly moving into floodplains due to lack of available options without the implementation of substantial risk reduction. In middle-income countries, increasing financial and other resources to protect and warn populations would lead to reduced vulnerabilities.

ps200306

Vaclav Smil was interviewed in the New Yorker last week. Non-paywalled version on the Internet Archive:

https://web.archive.org/web/20240228113153/www.newyorker.com/culture/persons-of-interest/vaclav-smil-and-the-value-of-doubt

More recently, Smil has written about ongoing efforts to address climate change, and about the feasibility of achieving “net zero” by 2050. In “How the World Really Works” published in 2022, he writes that, in the first two decades of the twenty-first century, “despite extensive and expensive expansion of renewable energies, the share of fossil fuels in the world’s primary energy supply fell only marginally”—from eighty-six per cent to eighty-two per cent—and that, during the same period, global consumption of fossil fuels actually increased, by forty-five per cent. Those numbers surprise people whose sense of environmental progress is shaped by car commercials and by news stories about breakthroughs in solar panels, algae-based fuels, and organisms that turn carbon dioxide into stone.

...

The recent slowing of China’s rate of industrialization—S-shaped curves eventually flatten—has not ended its reliance on fossil fuels; the Chinese are still building new coal-fired power plants at the rate of roughly two a week. Not that long ago, Beijing was still a city of bicycles; today, it’s plagued by air pollution, much of it produced by cars. China is the world’s leader in the manufacture of electric vehicles, but it’s also the world’s leader in generating electricity by burning coal. India’s road network, which is already the world’s second longest, after ours, is growing rapidly.

China’s energy consumption will likely peak before 2030, Smil said, but India, Pakistan, Indonesia, and countries in sub-Saharan Africa, among others, are already aiming to follow its growth example. “Don’t forget that at least two and a half billion people around the world still burn wood and straw and even dried dung for everyday activities—the same fuels that people burned two thousand years ago,” he continued. For many years to come, he added, economic growth in such places will necessarily be powered primarily by coal, oil, and natural gas. “They will do what we have done, and what China has done, and what India is trying to do now,” he said. The rate at which the world decarbonizes, he continued, will be determined by them, not by us.

Akrasia

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/121842998#Comment_121842998

What an extremely disengenuous point.

All storage facilities for everything, including Oil Depots and warehouses can be described in that way...

In reality, the ability to store things when they are plentiful to use when they are needed is ubiquitous in all parts of human economics apart from raw electricity, and BESS is finally being utilised to make energy markets more efficient by allowing us to store it when its over abundant, and use it when it's needed

machiavellianme

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/121847476#Comment_121847476

Speaking of disingenuous - ask the Market Monitor in UR about that. There have been numerous complaints about BESS manipulating prices, getting market positions and hoping the TSOs don't dispatch them because they need to save them for the peak. So the BESS gets a payment for not being run first and then another for running later. Cake and eat it springs to mind.

Blut2

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/121847260#Comment_121847260

Thats a great read, its well worth everyone's time to read the full thing.

It strips away the subjectivity/"feelings" of a lot of the climate debate and just mentions a lot cold hard facts. The paragraphs you quoted for one thing, but also things like:

"For centuries, humans have routinely converted improvements in efficiency into increases in consumption. In an e-mail, Smil told me that, in terms of per-capita energy use in the United States, “there is no indication that many kinds of better efficiencies have combined to bring any notable savings.” The average American used two hundred and eighty-five gigajoules in 2012, he said, and two hundred and eighty-four gigajoules in 2022, despite significant efficiency gains in every category. And our record would look worse if, during the past few decades, American companies hadn’t shifted so much manufacturing to fossil-fuel-powered factories in Asia."

ps200306

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/121847476#Comment_121847476

What an extremely disengenuous point.

All storage facilities for everything, including Oil Depots and warehouses can be described in that way...

In reality, the ability to store things when they are plentiful to use when they are needed is ubiquitous in all parts of human economics apart from raw electricity, and BESS is finally being utilised to make energy markets more efficient by allowing us to store it when its over abundant, and use it when it's needed

I don't think there's too many storage facilities that can buy energy at $50/MWh and sell it at $1500. I'm not disagreeing with your point, just pointing out the sort of incentives that draw BESS operators into the market. Don't be surprised when that market tops out way below the levels that would provide meaningful medium term storage. Have a listen to episode 111 of the "Redefining Energy" podcast below which interviews the Irish CEO of a BESS operator. The podcast series in general is a sanguine take on renewable energy from a French banker in London and an Irish one in Berlin.

https://www.redefining-energy.com/

Pa ElGrande

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/121847476#Comment_121847476

Impact of new balancing platform on GB BESS | Timera Energy (timera-energy.com)

Batteries create value from harvesting price volatility. The real time Balancing Mechanism (BM) has the most volatile prices in the GB market, yet battery (BESS) assets have captured limited BM value to date. source

The claims of the developers and renewable lobby is that battery storage will help to make intermittent renewables work. It has been obvious for a long time that "renewable" energy generators (wind and solar) create instability due to their intermittency, unpredictability and the fact that they are asynchronous generators. Now the same "renewable" energy developers claim we need BESS to solve problems they have created.  What a scam, and us consumers are paying for it!

roosterman71

An Taisce have decided that the plan for AD plants and hopes to replace gas with biomethane is a bad plan, and actually be more damaging to the climate than continuing to use gas as we do now

https://www.antaisce.org/news/draft-national-biomethane-strategy-lacks-scientific-and-economic-credibility

Meanwhile the EU are wondering why Ireland hasn't got their act together on biomethane

The EU has asked Ireland to elaborate on its climate plan measures for sustainable production of biomethane, "given Ireland’s sustainable biomethane potential and production, profile of natural gas consumption, and existing infrastructure, digestate use, and biogenic carbon applications".

More than 20,000 anaerobic digestion plants across the EU produce biogas, but the sector’s potential in Ireland has not yet been tapped. The ask comes in Brussels's assessment of Ireland's draft energy and climate plan, which includes recommendations to raise Irish climate ambitions in line with EU targets for 2030.

https://www.irishexaminer.com/farming/arid-41346728.html

Ya'd wonder what the hell is going on here. On one hand we've a plan to bring biomethane via AD intot he mix. The EU are wondering why it's taking so long (fair enough as the tech is all over the EU and in NI). While we have an eNGO saying that it shouldn't be done.

Elsewhere, the same groups plans to get the Nitrates Action Plan to be deemed unfit for purpose and thrown out has suffered a blow

https://www.ifa.ie/campaigns/ifa-reaction-to-high-court-nitrates-judgment/

roosterman71

Is this sort of craic allowed?

https://www.businesspost.ie/politics/ryan-intervenes-directly-in-senseless-shannon-lng-plan/

Are people allowed get onto ABP and tell them what to do?

charlie14

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/121856514#Comment_121856514

An Taisce are certainly not short on neck.

They sent a letter to government ministers and departments on this National Biomethane Strategy where their view was that it "gave the strong appearance of regulatory capture by vested interests", while being one of the vested interests that are doing very well financiallly out of these greening regulations.

But then perhaps I am misjudging An Taisce due to their " The strategy as drafted is undermined by major due diligence failures by government and agencies. Biased stakeholder consultations fovoured the powerful interests most likely to financially benefit from misdirected public supports, questionable "green gas"credits, and substantial public monies" and they are now, rather than spend so much time around the Four Goldmines at the taxpayers expense, going to issue statements on other such greening strategies concerning failures of due dilligence, powerful interests financially benefiting and misdirected support of substantial public monies.

I won`t be holding my breath waiting though.

ps200306

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/121856514#Comment_121856514

Hilarious to see An Taisce complaining that "Big Silage" is overestimating fossil natural gas costs in order to cast AD in a good light...

6. Speculative gas costs ...

As seen over the past three years, fossil (“natural”) gas prices are subject to dramatic fluctuations due to geopolitical events, therefore the gas prices used in most AD biomethane mitigation assessments are speculative or notional at best...

7. AD biomethane is a high cost energy source

The SEAI Heat Study states that biomethane ‘can be a competitive option if the costs and benefits are shared across all gas grid users’, but the new Strategy fails to spell out how this will be achieved. Instead, a few powerful gas users and biomethane supply chain interests are likely to benefit most and any financial benefits to the public remain unclear ...

So natural gas costs are inflated when "Big Silage" quotes them, but not when "Big Wind" is claiming wind power nine times cheaper than gas. As it happens, the spot price on the Dutch TTF is now not only way below the 2022 spike from the Ukraine conflict, but lower than any time during the run up of the previous year as well. At the start of last week prices hit €23/MWh, a level not seen since March 2021 and barely a quarter of recent wind auction prices.

Also a bit rich to see An Taisce questioning the financial benefits to the public when all the retrofit and operating costs of their preferred heat pump option are shouldered by the consumer. Not that I have any grá for "Big Silage" ... a pox on both their houses!

machiavellianme

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/121858557#Comment_121858557

Why do you call it big silage? Are folk really growing valuable foodstuffs to convert it directly into biomethane? Surely it's big slurry, using waste products?

ginger22

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/121859625#Comment_121859625

AD doesn't work like that I am afraid. It needs mixed feedstock like grass, maize etc as well as slurry.

roosterman71

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/121859625#Comment_121859625

Silage is the best feedstuff for an AD plant. Ya get more bang for yer buck. It will take slurry, food waste, etc too but silage is much better.

One of the AD aims of course is to produce our own gas for the network and/or power generation (An Taisce don't agree). The bonus for the eNGOs is that it would divert farmers from livestock where they'd grow grass for these plants instead of animals, thus reducing animal numbers. It's lost on them that you'd need fertiliser to grow the grass, and with less slurries available (through being diverted to AD and less animals producing it) means more chemical fertiliser will be spread.

You'll notice there too that barley straw is the best feedstuff, but you won't hear that out loud. That's because there are incentives to no longer produce straw from tillage with payments available for chopping it and returning it to the ground to increase soil organic matter. The aim for AD is convert grassland from livestock to energy production.

One of the positives is that the digestate is excellent fertiliser. The downside is it's classed as waste and needs special licensing as far as I know for disposal. The consistency would be similar to slurries, but the N content is much higher. The ideal scenario is the grass is grown and added to an AD plant, with the digestate retuning to grow the next crop. Studies are ongoing on the use of red clover and MSS as AD feedstuffs. These would require much less fertiliser to grow

ginger22

https://www.independent.ie/farming/forestry-enviro/urban-farming-has-a-surprisingly-high-climate-toll/a369466769.html

machiavellianme

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/121860151#Comment_121860151

Thanks roosterman, that table is very insightful. Looks like we should be producing more chickens, ducks and turkeys!

roosterman71

The Killala biomass plant is being revived and got operational after a new planning application was approved. It will burn woodchip, 40% will be "local" with the rest imported. That's nearly 200,000 tons of woodchip to be imported. Imported to Killybegs and then trucked down the ~170km to the power station. But have no fear if sustainability and emissions and the climate is your concern The supplied biomass will "meet all criteria under a “chain of custody” for sustainability and certification requirements."

https://www.farmersjournal.ie/news/news/mayo-biomass-plant-to-use-almost-200-000t-of-imported-woodchips-808094

charlie14

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/121860151#Comment_121860151

After the shambles of growing willow I would imagine farmers would be very cagey of destocking and supplying grass without contracts guaranteeing price. There would also be the question that if they did destock would they be allowed to restock should they wish too.

While digestate may be a good fertiliser and with no slurry available to these farmers, would that still not necessitate the use of chemical fertilisers, and would any carbon emission reductions from this biogas be credited to farming or transport ?

Apologies knowing all that is more or less asking how long is a piece of string, but as with more or less everything green agenda driven the devil is in the details.

roosterman71

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/121861316#Comment_121861316

Well willow was a new crop and took a bit more thought. Growing grass is second nature to many and if it's worthwhile, then easy to destock and sell the grass to the plant. The key of course is if there are incentives to destock as that could prevent going back in. The latest Progress Report on Climate Action Plan 2023 has highlighted the lack of a dairy exit scheme as a bad mark against the DAFM. They also highlight that any scheme must result in a reduction and not just Farmer A destocking while Farmer B gets bigger to negate the effort.

Digestate wouldn't give enough NPKs. For example, if you were supplying grass from land with P and K indicies of 3 or 4, you would be prevented from importing slurry or digestate. But you'd still need N to get a crop. Again it would depend on the finances involved. 2023 had an average cost of production for bales around the €35/bale mark, which wouldn't include haulage off farm to an AD plant. This also goes into the derogation imits and restrictions on slurry on farm with the existing rules. More chemical fertiliser will be needed as a result. Furthermore, there's more talk of restricting lower stocked farms to less NPKs (where ever it's from) which would result in soil degradation as the indicies will plummet without the nutrients being put back. Remember, exporting grass out the arm gate is exporting nutrients. To keep the soil healthy and productive, those exported nutrients have to be put back somehow.

charlie14

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/121861526#Comment_121861526

Willow is not difficult to grow. If anything it`s difficult to get rid off. Far as I recall there was a quite recent scheme for the Burren to control it. The problem was not growing it, there was 3,000 acres of it planted under a biomass scheme, but practically all of that acreage is now gone because there was either no market for it, or the price was so low it wasn`t worth harvesting. I cannot see many farmers destocking to provide grass for biogas unless there are contracts guaranteeing index linked prices for all they can produce (same as for offshore wind) and being allowed to restock should they wish too.

Reducing cattle numbers would reduce the use of chemical fertilisers as it would reduce the volume of grass required due to less cattle being raised on the same acreage, but then as you point out, if that destocked acreage is used to harvest grass for biogas, then with no slurry or digestate being allowed, and talk of restricting lower stocked farms to less NPKs, then the farmer supplying grass would be year on year looking at the law of diminishing returns with grass yield dropping year on year.

I have nothing against producing biogas from grass,(although where the sense is in us reducing our cattle numbers to provide this grass while these Mercusor countries are supplying the same tonnage to the E.U. as we are I fail to see), but any farmers looking at destocking to supply grass would need to be very sure of what they are getting into with these ever changing rules and regulations on slurry, digestate and NPK fertilisers

Francie Barrett

https://www.businesspost.ie/article/electricity-prices-in-ireland-significantly-above-eu-average/

Highest electricity prices in Europe. Why isn't tackling this a priority?

Yet the government can spunk €23m on a referendum that no one really wanted.

Gloomtastic!

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/121865251#Comment_121865251

Because that would involve tackling the trade unions and their overpaid ESB staff. Gutless government once again…….

roosterman71

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/121865295#Comment_121865295

How are trade unions and overpaid ESB staff setting the electricity price?