Energy infrastructure

I see that the EWIC 500 MW interconnector is still not working. It's off line now for a month past the original planned maintenance. Anybody know what went wrong or what the cost of not running this critical infrastructure is costing? Must be millions now.

All vague but was there another planned maintenance?

Here is an interesting example of how complex and tight the entire grid system can be

What a Difference a Day Can Make - VIOTAS reference to amber alerts too little wind and the 70+ max.

Ireland's first grid scale solar plant was just energised. It's 8MWp in Wicklow. Supported under the government's RESS1 programme. https://www.rte.ie/news/ireland/2022/0429/1295115-solar-farm/

Source: https://www.independent.ie/regionals/wicklow/lifestyle/irelands-first-grid-connected-ground-mounted-solar-farm-to-open-at-millvale-41590828.html

By my calculations at best it can only generate an income of around €2million gross a year, cant see viability when you deduct rates, maintenance and wages

"Saw this on the news recently. Wonderful. Another future mountain of e-waste that will mainly produce electricity when it's least needed (summer daytimes). Also probably being subsidised out the wazoo, wonder how much it's going to add to our already stupidly high electricity costs."

See this is your problem right there - no facts to back up whatever your argument is. If you can post on a message board, then you can use google to find out what are the actual facts instead of imagining what you think is probably the case.

In fact you don't even need to google - there's a link, a couple of posts before yours, to the actual RESS auction results which provide the price per MWh this solar producer will be paid and for how long (it's 72.92 euro for 16.5 years in case you're interested in using actual facts).

Now you could have produced an argument comparing this price with the cost of coal, wind, NG or even nuclear generation if you wanted an actual discussion. I've no idea why you think making baseless claims based on what you "imagine" is the case will convince anyone when they can do their own checking.

And your "mountain of e-waste" claim is also baseless - again this was discussed a few pages back - along with links to various studies. The failure rates and degradation rates of solar PV panels are both tiny - under 2% of modern panels fail every 25 years.

A reversal of what?? - north Kerry is already half destroyed with windfarms, including in areas that are meant to be SPAs for rare species. As for the planning regulator, they should be more concerned about the number of wind farms, either planned or built that are clearly not in compliance with various EU directives etc.

It'd also be interesting to see where the remaining large suitable wind sites are ...

I assume altitude and proximity to the coast are factors , (as well as transmission network )

The tech isn't new, but even trials to date have been incredibly limited. BMW Hydrogen 7 I think was the only one of any volume and that was a: 100 cards and b: nearly two decades ago!

If this turns out to be practical and safe - I wouldn't be confident of either - the Bamford family now has bus manufacturing also and a long range double decker bus (compared to battery electric) running on hydrogen would probably sell quite well.

Fuel cell and direct combustion are quite different in terms of potential range though.

Yeah combustion is just not a runner at all.

But even fuel cells make no sense to me when you think of the entire process.

One option for a carbon-free vehicle is take electricity, plug in your vehicle, charge the battery and off you go - accounting for all losses 70% to 90% of the electrical energy gets transferred to kinetic energy to move a BEV. The only infrastructure you need are copper wires.

The second is, take electricity, use electrolysis to generate hydrogen (20% to 40% losses), compress it or liquify it or use (toxic) ammonia to store it, transport it to storage at a hydrogen station, where it gets transferred to the vehicle and stored on-board, then use s fuel cell to turn it back into electricity (another 40% losses) before you get any kinetic energy out of the system. Studies show end-to-end efficiency is 25% to 30% versus 70% to 90% for BEVs.

And all the time you're dealing with a highly explosive gas which is almost impossible to handle without some amount of leakage which requires very careful engineering.

Does the "fast fill" advantage really justify all this massive increase in complexity, cost, engineering and huge loss of efficiency - consuming 3 times the electricity to move the vehicle the same distance? Not to mention that the inevitable hydrogen that will leak (as the smallest atom, it can get through anything) is now known to have a large indirect greenhouse gas effect by slowing the natural decomposition of methane. It just seems daft to me.

One wee fault George, a lot of sites don't have power, maybe a wee genie to boil the kettle but nothing to charge 20 tonne of industrial machinery . Green cnuts are going to have to grasp reality and understand that big yellow diggers have to run on diesel and no level of green wa##ing is going to change that