Energy infrastructure

Do offshore developments even need planning ? Is it basically ministerial or department approval ? ( I know the cable the cables will need to come ashore somewhere .. and there'll be some level of building required , but I assume that'll be stand alone ..

Gawd yeah ,.

The problem with domestic rooftop PV is its cost. LCOE is can be up to 7 times that per KWh of grid-scale PV according to Lazards - https://www.lazard.com/perspective/levelized-cost-of-energy-levelized-cost-of-storage-and-levelized-cost-of-hydrogen/ - that's a worst case scenario but even for best-case you're looking at 3 to 4 times the cost to generate the same KWh from a panel on a domestic house compared to from a grid-scale installation. The imperative should be to increase renewable electricity generation as fast as possible and given that capital is a finite resource and has a cost, so I think the priority should be on developing grid scale solar first given the much greater bang-per-buck.

The problem with large scale solar is that it requires a lot of space. If they are on the ground, it takes land from other uses and land is also a finite resource. Ground solar farms haveto take account of the opportunity cost for that land, and in this country land is generally better put to other uses. Roof space is generally unused and that is where we should be targeting for solar.

There is the potential for large scale solar on roofs, be they domestic or otherwise. The back of my house faces south, most of the houses in the estate have half the roof facing south (half of those it's the back half of the roof, the other half it's the front). There is the potential for a good area of south facing PV panels across the houses with the correct orientation. The house owners may not directly use the energy generated, it might be a case of just rentingsome roof space from them. There would obviously be a lot coordination involved (and associated costs) but it would be a better approach than covering fields in panels.

The fact that electricity supply is no longer a national service in this country, it is a commercial enterprise. The supply companies are not interested in us being able to save on costs and generate some of our own requirement - they just want to charge us more for using less of their energy.

A wee wind turbine beside every rural house would solve a lot of issues but Eirgrid would have kittens at the thought

Roofs doesn't automatically mean domestic scale, enough roofs would mean much bigger scale and less cost than individual homeowners installing PV themselves.

There really isn't that much land available for solar on that scale. It would have to be unproductive yet fairly flat, right orientation, etc. You also need the grid infrastructure and that is less likely to be in the locations where the land is less suitablefor agriculture. Apart from cut away bogs, particularly wherethere was a power station, I doubt you'd find somewhere suitable for 1GW of solar. There would no doubt be huge pushback from the local community too, likely more so than we currently see against pylons.

Anyone think that the Electric Ireland CEO's comment that those who can't afford the price hike should contact SVP should be sacked ?

You're really trying to argue that there's more scope for panels on rooftops than there is on unused land? Roofs are - not surprisingly - located where people want to live or work not where solar installations make more sense.

1GW of PV capacity would require about 2000 or 3000 hectares of land. Such an installation wouldn't even cover 3% of the Bog of Allen - and the the Bog of Allen itself represents only 8% of the bogland in Ireland. That's before you even look at marginal non-bog land. The availability of land for PV is a non-issue - much more so than wind turbine locations.

Globally capacity growth in utility scale is 2 to 3 times that of rooftop - while in the past it represented the biggest share of PV installation - and the countries where rooftop has been embraced in a big way (Australia) are facing serious problems because the only way to make it attractive to individuals and businesses is to offer guaranteed feed-in tariffs. This has made grid-operations a nightmare. Because of the large rooftop solar capacity, wholesale electricity prices in Australia experience massive swings from negative prices to over 1k per MWh which is paradoxically killing investment in grid-scale renewables.

On the other hand, utility-scale solar is so cheap it can and does compete with other forms of generation without support which is why it's in a massive growth cycle globally. No need for Ireland to either buck the global trend or repeat the mistakes made by other countries in the past.

No discussion of the merits of different generation technologies can ignore LCOE - https://www.lazard.com/perspective/levelized-cost-of-energy-levelized-cost-of-storage-and-levelized-cost-of-hydrogen/ - and for me this is what kills the case for making rooftop solar a key part of de-carbonization. I like the idea of rooftop solar (combined with batteries and/or EVs - a bit like CorrectHorseBatteryStaple's set-up which is almost idea) and think it deserves SOME government support but grid-scale is where the real growth will happen and where the real contribution to de-carbonization will occur.