Energy infrastructure

I'm not clear on the reasons someone would get one of those hot water tanks that turn on when the grid frequency is a bit high and turn off when the grid frequency is a little low. It sounds like they would be paying for market based electricity prices while providing frequency stability services to the grid. I'm not sure altruism of helping the grid while paying standard rates is going to convince many people. What we really need to see is ways for companies to aggregate enough domestic / small commercial customers so that the company can offer frequency stability services to EirGrid under the DS3 programme. The company can they pay-out to their customers a cut of the payment from EirGrid.

Matt Ferrel's Undecided YouTube channel talks about his experience using his home batteries as part of a virtual power plant. Essentially he gives control of a portion of his home batteries to a company, who will use it to soak up excess power and release needed power from the battery to help balance the grid locally. The company has 1,000 households in his area. The grid operator pays the company, who pay him. Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_UJiglrYgJY

It's an interesting model that we need to see more of in Ireland, but we haven't built the regulatory or commercial structures for it yet.

Fracking and Tar Sands must be viable again, Boris likely to give permission for fracking in Feemanagh,

Is there really large amounts of gas just sitting there off the Irish coast , waiting to be tapped - I know the barryroe field is a possibility , but possible ,no more ...

At the moment gas storage could be the best form of energy security for Ireland .. But both kinsale and guileen have been decommissioned..

Wholesale prices are BS - its retail prices were the real cost of wind on a grid kicks in via its accomodation on the grid, RESS money etc.

What would RESS money have to do with UK wholesale prices? You know that RESS is an Irish thing, right?

Anyway, there are none so blind as those as those who will not see:

And here are retail prices:

Even with consumer contracts being stickier than wholesale prices, the rise lines up with the spike in wholesale prices. As any sane person would expect.

Why not use google or whatever before making outlandish statements?

You're being highly disingenuous giving a price for nuclear without pointing out what "LTO" means or that the numbers you quote do not apply to new build nuclear which is what the other prices refer to. LTO is long term operation which basically considers the initial capital cost as sunk. You've written "nuclear: 35", the report actually contains "nuclear: 42 to 102".

That number is still lower than estimates given by most other analysis, so I went to the bother of reading through the report.

It's pretty relevant to point out that this report is jointly written with the OECD Nuclear Energy Agency - an advocacy organization. It probably explains the unorthodoxy in their approach.

The report represents a "model" of what the prices should be in 2020. Using a "model" instead of simply presenting a summary of actual/observed data is suspiciously convenient in a report commissioned by a nuclear power advocacy. As part of this "model", for example, they've "adjusted" the nuclear prices down to reflect "reductions due to learning from first-of-a-kind (FOAK)". In other words, their model assumes (without proof) that the price of subsequent reactors of the same design will be significantly lower - while in reality the EPR story demonstrates nothing of the kind.

Then this handy "Nuclear (LTO)" category they present prominently - which you disingenuously present as the LCOE for nuclear. Funny the report doesn't do the same for wind or solar - probably because ignoring the initial capital cost of construction, the LCOE of wind and solar is practically zero.

Independent reports - not written by an industry player - don't mess with the data like this to burnish numbers for their pet industry. And they all present nuclear in a much worse light. Lazard's - https://www.lazard.com/perspective/levelized-cost-of-energy-levelized-cost-of-storage-and-levelized-cost-of-hydrogen/ - is probably the most widely quoted:

• nuclear: $131 - $204
• combined cycle gas: $45 - $74
• on-shore wind: $26 - $50
• solar PV: $28 - $41

And these number explain trends in electricity generation perfectly - the dwindling of nuclear and the explosion of wind and solar.

You're making a good point here. What really matters at the end of the day is total system costs. Wind as an isolated component is cheap. If we were aiming for a wind only grid that required lots of batteries or synchronous condensers, which are relatively expensive, then it wouldn't be cheap.

Right now, given the current situation with the Irish grid wind is cheap. Every new wind turbine is displacing burning gas. The grid can buy wind power cheaper than gas power. That will not always be true. In the future we will need power other than from wind to balance the grid – there isn't a clear alternative dispatchable option that is cheaper than gas.

At the moment, we're only producing a max of 75% of our power from wind at any one time. The current average over the year is 40% wind power. For 2030 we need to be able to produce +95% wind power at any one time to get a yearly average of 80%. That's a very different grid with many more supporting technologies and grid improvements needed. Getting to 100% renewables or a zero carbon grid will require even more supporting technologies and grid improvements. At the end of the day electricity consumers will pay for these investments.

In a 100% renewables / zero carbon grid utilising unproven or currently expensive technologies (CCS, hydrogen, lithium ion batteries, redox flow batteries etc) I'm less convinced that the total system costs (and thus prices for consumers) will be lower than today's prices with a fossil fuel mix. Maybe costs will come down for these technologies.

At the end of the day with climate change it will be extremely painful and expensive to do nothing because of the damage it will bring. We need to transition to a zero-carbon grid.

It's fair to say that:

• It is TRUE to say that adding more renewables, like wind, to the grid will provide downwards pressure on electricity costs in Ireland
• It is NOT true to say that a 100% renewable / zero carbon grid will be cheaper to build and operate than the grid we have today (as long as you ignore the cost of climate change)

They started errecting turbines there in 1994.

Electrolysers cost about €1m per MW, some companies claims about low future costs and automation remind me of Musk and his lies about making Teslas with robots. There are significant costs in compressing hydrogen and the turbines and pipelines are not in place. More of you typical lies. Those were built for NG and can not handle hydrogen without replacement or retrofit.

"Green hydrogen is not yet broadly cost competitive as compared to the conventional fuels it would substitute"https://ser-colombia.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/11/lazards-levelized-cost-of-hydrogen-analysis-version-20-vf.pdf

It's nice to dream about near zero cost surplus electricity from wind feeeding an electrolyser - and that would be possible if the government built and owned the capacity, but that isn't the reality so any input to an elctrolyser is going to cost the same as the grid gets charged - speaking as a hypothetical sharholder in an Irish wind farm. We aren't a charity, you know.

I haven't yet seen a simple per MW costing of a complete hydrogen cycle, from turbine tip to the wires feeding into the grid. When simple costings aren't available it's either because they don't know or they do know, but won't reveal them because they are far too high to fit an agenda.