ESB new peaker plant will be ... natural gas

celtic_oz wrote: »

just like Dublin bus buy diesel buses and when embarrassed in the media submit to a few hybrids when clearly electric bus's are the future

650 (2/3rds of the fleet) of the most advanced Hybrid buses on the market!

The buses they ordered are plugin hybrids with a relatively decent sized battery that allows them operate for a few km purely on battery power using GPS technology (say when inside the core city center).

Of course we would prefer full EV buses, however the technology is immature and not ready for real world use on Double Decker buses. The plan is to move to full EV buses in 5 years time when they hope the technology to have matured.

Same with this story. 75MW is a very small plant. We have always known that Gas will need to play a part in the mix with wind. Wind is fantastic, but obviously it doesn't blow all the time, so a backup is required.

Gas is a good backup to wind. Gas can be cycled up relatively fast (compared to coal), if the wind isn't blowing and it only produces roughly 1/3rd of the amount of CO2 as coal, so relatively much cleaner.

Of course Battery backup plants are a great option too and yes, two of those are currently been built. However while batteries have been very successfully used to handle very sudden spikes in demand, they are nowhere near good enough or cheap enough for widespread installation as backup to the entire wind production capability.

We are currently at 40% renewables (mostly wind), with the plan to go 70% in the next few years. But this is only possible with backup from Gas and interconnectors to French and UK Nuclear power.

This is all a fantastic improvement over just 15 years ago when we only had 2 to 3% renewables and burned mostly dirty coal and Peat.

Going green is hard and it requires well thought out and engineered solutions.

So EV buses definitely work for single decker buses, but double deckers are much harder.

The big problem with batteries on buses is where do you put them. Normally you put them on the floor in cars, but you can't do that with buses, since buses need to be low floor for accessibility (wheelchairs, etc.). Single decker buses are relatively easy as you can simply put the batteries on the roof.

But you might notice we mostly use double deck buses and that is much more challenging. You can't put the batteries on the floor and obviously you can't put them on the roof, since it would make it too high (hit a bridge) and make it way too top heavy (bus falls over).

There have been two double decker EV buses trialled in Lodnon, one by BYD and one by Optare. The solution they used was to simply fill the back of the bus with the batteries. The problem with this approach, is that it removes multiple rows of seats for passengers and it results in the bus carrying less passengers.

This is bad when the buses are already jam packed and risks people deciding to use their much more polluting car instead.

In addition to the space problem, the trial of these buses found that they didn't have enough battery/range for all day operation and that they had reliability issues.

EV double deckers simply aren't mature enough yet. They need advances in battery tech so you can get more range out of less space/weight, so that they can operate all day and take up less passenger space.

I also want to point out, that our Diesel buses are actually one of the cleanest forms of transport we have (only DART and Luas are better). Most of the fleet are now Euro 6 engines which are VERY clean. As an example a Euro 6 Dublin Bus produces 1/10th the amount of NOX as a Diesel Volkswagen Golf. That is comparing vehicles directly. On a per passenger basis that is actually 1/800th the amount of NOX produced by a typical Diesel car!

If we could ban cars and get everyone to use these Diesel buses, we would VASTLY reduce the amount of pollution from transport. Really your focus is on the wrong place.

I'm a big fan of EV technology and I can't wait to see it to come to public transport. However if you actually cared about the environment, then your focus should be on getting people out of cars and onto public transport/walking/cycling. That would have a much more immediate impact to the environment.