Would renewables ever provide Dublin's energy

Okay, so while it's true that it's more efficient to transmit electricity over shorter distances, the whole island is connected to the same grid.

Electricity generated in moneypoint can be used to power Dublin

So there doesn't necessarily need to be turbines in the Dublin mountains to power the city. They could be out in the Atlantic

Having said that, let's think it out. For the sake of argument, let's assume money is basically no obstacle and we're confined to using currently available technology

So no waiting around for fusion reactors or magic batteries with 10x current capacity

Okay, first and easiest thing to do is reduce capacity. The main users of energy in Ireland are houses and transportation. Admittedly a lot of that is gas or oil, but as they move to electricity that fuel mix will shift and can be provided by renewables

Okay, so let's assume we insulated every house to A1 rated BER. That would dramatically reduce the demand from heating

While we're at it, put solar panels on the roofs of most houses and a small battery to further reduce the load on the grid and allow electricity usage to shift away from the typical peaks and troughs through the day

Now for transportation, and the EV advocates are going to be annoyed because the best answer here is electric trains and buses. Improving transport links to the commuter belt plus some sort of congestion charge in the city will reduce car usage. It's a lot more energy efficient to put 50 people on an electric bus than to have them in 50 electric cars

While we're at it, improve cycling infrastructure, since bikes are mostly powered by someone having their Weetabix in the morning

Also, people who work from home don't need to commute, so maybe offer some tax incentives to companies that allow employees to be flexible in when and where they work. That'll cut down the capacity need for public transport

Next biggest user is industry, which is a nicely ambiguous title. I don't think there's much to do here because they're typically paying a lot more for electricity here compared to other countries, so they're probably already trying to be efficient. However, offering some incentives to have onsite battery banks and solar should at least allow them to shift consumption away from peak usage times

Right, after all that, how do we actually generate our renewables. Well like I said, the power plants can really be anywhere, but I imagine there'll be several wind farms in the Irish sea, probably in the Kish bank, off Bray and Malahide coasts up to Skerries

Turbines up the Dublin mountains would work, as well as north and west county Dublin

I think the real key will be using pumped hydro. There's already several dams and artificial lakes in the Wicklow mountains, so I think we'll need the capacity to pump water from downriver up the mountains and then reverse the flow. That'll help bridge the gap around peak times

I think there'll still be some annoying times when we need to burn something for energy, probably middle of winter when solar isn't doing great and a few calm days can drain your reserves. So there'll probably need to be several gas turbines, maybe powered from a mix of hydrogen and biogas. Plus storage facilities so we can stockpile for cloudy, calm days

To be fully reliable on renewables requires masses of energy storage.

Hydro is the most reliable renewable storage. I think we should build dams in some bays on the west coast and use our excess wind to run pumps.

Utility level batteries aren't there yet.

There's some fairly advanced technical reasons why you can't get to 100% powered by renewables. I know , I know....they "say" that they are powered by 100% renewables, but in reality, it's actually quite difficult to synchronize the frequency with renewables, and it's not really 100%

If you fancy a read. Challenges of renewable energy penetration on power system flexibility: A survey - ScienceDirect

The problem is that the wind even on a good day, doesn't blow uniforminly (annoyingly), meaning that it's dificult to balance the load to the generation. So you need "something" in the grid to instantaneously produce power on demand. For many grids, these are fast reacting hydro stations, but also you may need some gas fired stations in low standby mode, where they can kick in if necessary.

I believe one of the plans for grid stabilization in Ireland is a massive feck off flywheel in moneypoint. One of (if not thee) biggest in the world.

World’s Largest Flywheel – How Moneypoint is leading the world in increasing renewable penetration on electrical grids (limerickpost.ie)

You can get close with these type of things on your grid, like 90% from renewables.

It will never be 100% with renewables but we may hit it with sustainable energy now that the EU have designated investment in certain Nuclear and gas as sustainable, who knows coal and oil could be next.Even Greta T is coming round to nuclear in certain circumstances.

https://www.cleanenergywire.org/news/greta-thunbergs-pro-nuclear-comment-stirs-german-runtime-extension-debate

From a very low base, government policy on solar is painfully slow, look at the planning and FIT debacles and we still have VAT on renewable materials.

FIT pricing is good from the suppliers, the actual implementation of it is a clusterfcuk with the wording on most of their T&C's unclear and payment dates as far away as March 23 if they go through.

Absolutely they could, but none of it will be in sight of Dublin, that's for culchies.

The slight snag is the monumental and near unbelievable amount of money that will be required, despite there being cheaper zero CO2 options the government has specifically ruled out and legislated against.

I'm sure they said the same thing in the design phase of those older plants 😉

I definitely agree that the older plants should be kept running as long as it's safe to do so. I think the main issue with a lot of the German ones is they need to be refueled, which is a fairly delicate process

Also I read somewhere that Russia is the main supplier of uranium to Europe, so still a bit of fuel dependency on the big bad imperialists

My main concern with nuclear is around building new plants. It seems like a total waste of money and resources

Consider Flamanville unit 3, 15 years under construction, 5x over budget and not one usable watt of electricity generated

How many solar farms and wind turbines could have been installed with that money (€12.7 billion to date)? How much closer to 100% truly green energy could France be if they had spent the money elsewhere?

And consider that France is very pro nuclear and has a lot of expertise in that area. Other countries find it a lot harder and more expensive to build nuclear power

So for me, nuclear is on life support, it just can't compete financially with wind and solar, which are both cheaper and quicker to bring online and easier to maintain

Yup there's that. Periods for which you simply cannot have enough storage even if we had storage. :)

And yet for all the things your say about the cost in construction of Nuclear plants (which I agree with.....it's a MASSIVE cost mate) France historically has a cheaper price of Electricity compared to say Germany, which is always seen as a pro-renewables country with high adoption of solar etc. That doesn't seem right does it, but it's true. I don't know if there's some "funny business" going on there in terms of subsidies, but the numbers are here.

Electricity price statistics - Statistics Explained (europa.eu)

If I'm honest , I was pretty negative about nuclear 20 years ago. Part of this is a throw back to the psychology of growing up in the 80's where we had organizations such as Greenpeace dominating the news. Putting their small ships in front of larger ships transferring fuel rods, or people blocking trains transporting waste. Then there was the cold war at it's height and the doom-gloom of nuclear war which tainted my opinion of using nuclear as a source of electricity.

Then landscape has changed with the realization that climate change is a WAY bigger problem than nuclear so I've reversed my original thinking on it. Solar/wind/hydro all great and should be used, but the sad realities is that they can't do everything. New nuclear, small modular reactors, thorium as a fuel source, molten salts as coolant, etc these are new ideas/methodolgies paving the way forward. Waste, while always contentious, is a lot smaller and easier to deal with than 50+ billion tons of CO2 that we spurn out from coal/gas.

To go back to the OP though, people are saying that we could do it, but not in sight of Dublin. Well, plans would beg to differ on that......

Home Page - Dublin Array

The most recently completed NPP was built by the South Koreans in the UAE - the Barakah NPP. It took 8 years from construction start to commissioning of the first reactor. Per GW, it cost half as much as offshore wind, allowing for the capacity factor difference of about 50%. Given it will last twice as long as an offshore wind farm, the likely real cost difference is probably quadruple, but it's very difficult to know for sure because we don't know what vast scale energy storage will actually cost, as no country has managed to do it, in order to make renewables comparable to a hugely reliable baseload source like nuclear.

The current long term plan by the ESB calls for a staggering 30 GW of offshore wind by 2050. To provide 15 GW of nuclear power would likely cost around €54 Billion less. OSW has a capacity factor of 40-50% while a South Korean NPP has a capacity factor of 96%, so you only need half as much for the same amount of energy generated.

That's one the thing with nuclear which I believe can change. Current fuels like Uranium have a massive half-life, while new reactors currently under development are looking at fuels such as Thorium. This has a MUCH shorter half life, meaning that the waste fuels are "only" radioactive for mere 100's of years. Yeah, that sounds odd, 100's of years is still a long time but its a lot easier to plan for something in the 100's of years than 10,000's.

This is existing tech. Not some fusion based thing which I believe we will get to, but we're 30 years off.

But to the OP, I think if we can get to regularly getting 80% of Dublins energy from renewables - that's a good target.

I know it was tongue-n-cheek, but they are actually both fair points. Though you can drag out lots of "singular events" to try and prove/disprove viewpoints. It doesn't really work.

I think the main thing it to be open to new thinking. I was pretty against nuclear as I mentioned, but on the whole, it's probably safer for me (and maybe cheaper) than some other forms of generation. It's a bit old now (10 years), but this formed the basis of much of the knowledge I gathered about energy creation etc.

David MacKay FRS: : Contents (withouthotair.com)

It's a "free book" on the web and while it's a little dated, I'd recommend it as it outlines why nuclear isn't as bad as you originally though. If you read it and come away, well that was a pile of horseshit, fair enough.....but at least your "having a think" :-)

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We made the mistake of lumping nuclear energy in with nuclear weapons, as if all things nuclear were evil. I think that’s as big a mistake as if you lumped nuclear medicine in with nuclear weapons.

Patrick Moore,

former Director of Greenpeace International