11 Generator stuck in Dublin port for over a year because they are to heavy for M50

but they’re not for the grid, they are bought by data centres for data centres…They are nothing to do with the grid and will only generate electricity for their owners (power hungry data centres)

The point is they are in storage doing nothing, Microsoft and Evira should do a deal as I already mentioned as its quite obvious to all and sundry that the owners did not do their homework on transport and logistics planning.

We could be having this convo in 5 years time , just because they are in private sector hands doesn't mean they cant be sold on from the port to another consumer.

The grid has a limit to what it can carry. Transferring electricity over long distances also incurs losses.

It's no good locating these somewhere on the west coast if the grid cannot carry the demand all the way across to the east coast where it's needed and if you incur massive efficiency losses in doing so.

Better to locate your energy source as close to the demand as you can, particularly datacentres, as they're relatively constant loads that can shed significant demand from the grid in a very short space of time when margins are tight.

As to why they've gone with diesel engines, the size of which have been relatively unheard of here, is I suspect because:

(1) there wouldn't be a gas mains large enough to build gas turbine plant at the site,

(2) if you fuel the engines with 100% HVO then you can claim your energy as low carbon and environmentally friendly and crucially;

(3) future datacentre demand could be met directly by these plants, thereby bypassing the current effective moratorium on electrical grid connections for datacentres.

they are for backup generation, if the grid goes down these will kick in. If the grid asks them to droP load, these will kick in. If there’s supply constraints these will kick in

how?

A cluster fcuk for who?

Sure the accountants will work their magic and it won’t have cost much

The planning refusal was for a Google data centre rather than a Microsoft one, no?

At first the sun reported they were for the national grid. Now it seems to have come out that they are for the data centres.

These centres are a scourge. They offer no benefit to the population, negligible employment opportunities, their owners are tax avoiders, they drain our electricity resources and the cooling of them would have Irish waters steaming. Its insane what we have allowed to develop right under our noses.

Data Centres are not “small-ish” users of electricity. One Data Centre of the scale you see at Grange Castle uses as much electricity as 150,000 households.

This is my industry, and it pisses me off to see these smug tech-bros claiming to be at the forefront of a “clean” economy while their lousy software belches tonnes of CO2 into the atmosphere every week because there’s zero incentive to do better, and zero penalty for the pollution they cause. (Large-user electricity is not billed per kWh the way domestic is, and DC operators do not monitor energy use per customer, but rather divide it crudely based on hardware allocation, so there’s no benefit to writing software using more energy efficient methods).

No it can’t….

That’s 528 MWh a mega pack is only 3.9Mw and run for only 4 hours , so that’s just under 1MW for 4 hours

@Beta Ray Bill - Agree 100% with that assessment. The efficiency problem is endemic, as it comes from the agile/start-up culture of “get something running, and deal with performance later”. Because of how data centre pricing is structured, for most applications, it is cheaper to just throw more computers (and thus more electricity) at an inefficient data centre application than actually take some time to make it more efficient - it’s only when you get to hundreds of millions of users that the cost/benefit starts to favour a re-engineering.

Honestly, if we applied the same approach to roads, we’d have traffic crawling carefully along twelve-lane dirt tracks, because it was cheaper to widen the dirt-track than to build a proper road.

when do you run your simulations ? Are you conscious of running them outside peak hours and when renewables are available

Correct me if I'm wrong but the weight is nearly 500tons, what truck could haul this?

@gjim I wasn't arguing against economies of scale, but the way that outsourcing computing hides the impact of inefficient systems. On-prem is far worse, of course, but its also an environment where high costs due to poor systems design are more likely to be noticed and fixed. Committed Usage discounting is one of the factors I was taking about when I mentioned how DC pricing disincentivises making software more efficient.

But while DCs are able to deliver at a better monetary cost, the environmental cost isn't really that much better. The cost savings are due to economy of scale, and the way very large users are charged for power.

Apologies for dragging this off topic though... Generators, Dublin Port.

Looks like some of them are finally being moved to Grange Castle - late Sept through to early Nov.

https://www.sdcc.ie/en/news/notice-of-transportation-of-exceptional-abnormal-loads.html