Random Renewables Thread

We just need to concentrate on getting as much PV up as possible. Local use is nice, but not worth any complication or extra investment reducing the pay back time (this is bad for the tax payer). The rest can be done along the way at grid level (storage, grid fortification, interconnectors, etc.)

Zoom in and see lots more detail. On the right hand side, you can click on 'Layers' and see different types of infrastructure.

Zoom in on County Monaghan: https://openinframap.org/#9.16/54.1822/-7.0123 I have been systematically mapping every power line and transformer and am about 40% done.

In south County Down: https://openinframap.org/#10.07/54.1491/-6.0694 from Newry to Newcastle, you can see where the Mourne Mountains are completely uninhabited (and unpowered).

If you have a 6kw inverter and a neighbour with the 6c EV tariff you could potentially with the help of a AC->DC converter pump 18KWh a night into the grid and reap the 22c FIT

This would knock 86e a month off your bill by doing pretty much feck all and without degrading batteries. You could go halves with the neighbour. Depending on the neighbour's import capacity they could possibly still charge their EV at the same time

Interesting tidbit, they mentioned 82,000 microgeneration customers which gives an average of 3.66kW per microgeneration setup

The Netherlands now have the highest per capita installed PV. Surpassed Australia. Unreal stuff.

This means of course that on any sunny day, the flexible electricity rates are negative. So you stop your PV inverter and get paid to charge your battery, your car, heat your hot water and use any other electricity you like. Can't bloody wait for that here too. The actual realised profit over 2023 of a system with just a 20kWh battery (and no PV) over there was €2000 (the system costs €8000 installed)

I've not seen any solar at a data centre - they have lots of gas turbines and air conditioning units that make it impractical. Some do have long-term contracts to buy hundreds of MW of wind.

It would most likely be a variety of non-residential sites, including factories, farms and commercial / retail buildings. I understand that Eli Lilly in Kinsale take 100% of the power from Dunderrow Solar Farm. Butlers Chocolates in Dublin and a truck dealership in Monaghan have a huge amount of solar on their roofs. Lidl have put solar panels on a lot of their roofs.

There is a program to fit solar to many schools.

Up north and in Britain, a huge number of non-residential buildings have solar.

I'd say it's exactly that, something with enough power consumption to use up all of the solar power available

Saw a community swimming pool in Arklow which was covered in solar panels a few years ago. Must have been something like 10-15kWp installed

I'd say they'll still use all that power even on sunny days heating the pool and water for showers, etc.

The reason you don't see many panels on a data center is poor design due to HVACs on the roof, and they said air cooling was good 🤦‍♂️

Used to work in a data center a while back, if you see the size of those diesel generators, you would cry.

Maybe we can say they want to house some refugees in there, quickest way to erase it from the map 😂

I feel like a lot of office buildings might be in the 200MW non exporting

A bunch of offices have thrown some solar panels on the roof to get low energy ratings, but given the relatively limited roof space to floor space they're probably self using all of the energy

Particularly true since most office managers seem to want to have the lights and heating on all the time even when there's only 4 people working there

4.6Km^2 of solar per data center (back of the envelope maths). Wowwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwww

plenty of other businesses think outside the box like that. london underground use the heat in the tube to generate heat and hot water for apartments, leisure centres adjacent to a station. no reason why data centers cannot be used in a similar way.

There are a couple of primary considerations for the location of datacenters, but access to cheap power (Norway + hydro) etc and then nice temperate climate like Ireland (not too cold in the winter, not too hot in the summer) and then lastly ideally not setup on a geological fault line as some of them

Like the idea of recouping energy and pumping it back into the community like heating swiming pools, should be a requirement of planning permissions. Something I saw recently.....

Energy from data centres could heat UK swimming pools after green investment | Energy | The Guardian

a good start. Problem I fear is that many of these places are fairly far from high density populations, so you have big transmission losses if you try to do something.

@bullit_dodger - "Problem I fear is that many of these places are fairly far from high density populations, so you have big transmission losses if you try to do something."

You might be wrong there. Most of the big data centers are in my back yard near Grange Castle, in other words directly surrounded by major population and industrial centers like Lucan, Tallaght, Clondalkin, Citywest, etc. That's at least 300k people within 5km and who knows how many businesses needing lots of heating. Pfizer alone is less than 1km away from some of them and employes 5k people last time I looked.