Energy infrastructure

Is this Electric Interconnect correct and is the EWIC not working this past 3 weeks? If it's out - that would be

significant and no wonder prices are jumping like hell.. Anybody know anything about this - Only the Moyle seems to be doing it's job since 14th March?

Have you any actual data to prove your specific claim that solar PV is not viable in Ireland? E.g. capacity factors, specific yield (kWh/kWp), seasonality metrics, degradation rates, etc?

The potential and viability of solar PV is decided by science/engineering. You can be absolutely sure that the companies and countries that are investing billions in solar have "done the math".

The numbers are easy to access - here's a per country calculation done by the World Bank - https://documents.worldbank.org/en/publication/documents-reports/documentdetail/466331592817725242/global-photovoltaic-power-potential-by-country . No question that Ireland is one of the worst countries in the world for solar but yet the kWh/kWp is only a bit under half that of the best countries in the world.

Which means that it's commercially viable at scale in Ireland with todays technology. This is proven by the RESS auctions - quoting from https://www.nsenergybusiness.com/news/ireland-provisional-results-ress-auction/

"EirGrid, which implemented the auction process for RESS 1, said that the average strike price for all projects was €74.08/MWh. For solar projects, it stands at €72.92/MWh."

So even before the arrival of newer tech and expected improvements, solar can deliver electricity in Ireland at rates (just) below the average for renewables. Surely you agree that these privately financed companies bidding for solar in the RESS auction will have done their sums? Like the Danes, Germans and Dutch (particularly not known for their financial naivity) will have done the sums before rolling out solar capacity as fast as they can.

"costing more energy than their delivering"? The idea that a factory producing panels would require more energy than generated during the expected life time makes no sense at all. The degradation rates in HOT countries (where panels degrade faster) is about 0.5% a year. This means they are still expected to operate at nearly 90% efficiency after 25 years or 60% after 100 years. Basically, unless you take a hammer to a solar panel, they effectively last forever.

Like I say, Ireland is one of the worst countries for solar but that doesn't mean it isn't viable. And it provides a huge benefit to the grid by being uncorrelated with the other variable source electricity - wind. It simply comes down to numbers and, sorry, the numbers prove you wrong.

I checked out the generation status on the UK National grid and what you are saying is correct. Not much wind today but blue sky and 10% of electricity is coming from PV.

Is there any grid yet that can handle 100%?

But to be honest if a private company are happy to put solar panels up and only get paid a reasonable amount for what they actually deliver - then happy days ...

i don’t think you can really expect to import or export a constant 29kVA on every rural single phase domestic type connection at once. I don’t think there is anything like that amount of transformer capacity. I would expect a domestic connection to have a couple of kVA of transformer capacity upstream.

Another example: https://www.arla.com/company/news-and-press/2022/pressrelease/new-solar-park-in-denmark/

"Arla Foods announces ambitious collaboration with the renewable energy company Better Energy regarding four new solar parks that will cover approximately one third of Arla's electricity consumption in Denmark by 2024. It is the most extensive agreement on renewable electricity from a Danish company without public subsidies in Danish history"

A completely unsubsidised purely commercial decision. Despite the claims of someone on twitter, solar PV works and is viable in northern Europe.

Meh - it reminds me of the plans for covering the Sahara in solar panels and building massive inter-connectors to export the power to Europe. It kinda/arguably made sense when panels were considered somewhat expensive and it seemed important to maximise their efficiency. But the 90% drop in panel prices in a decade has completely undermined the financial basis of all these ideas. It's now significantly cheaper to build 4 times as many panels in northern Europe even if they operate at half the efficiency than it is to site them in Africa and build the inter-connector infrastructure.

Same with using mechanical systems to maximise panel efficiency - at some point (that we seemed to have passed), it's more economic to just add more super cheap panels, than to build and maintain auxiliary mechanical systems.

It reminds me of when microprocessors displaced "big iron" processors in super-computing - they just became so cheap that all their deficiencies in terms of performance and features could effectively be compensated for by just using more of them. Now all the biggest fastest super computers in the world are based on commodity intel/amd chips - the days of custom super-advanced designs that those of Cray are over.