Energy infrastructure

Not just cheaper , probably a lot more energy efficient, to continue to have a large power station with a fuel store , and a commonly shippable fuel , as a reserve station ,

Than to build 2 or 3 new Combined cycle gas turbines , or 4 or 5 new open cycle gas turbines ,that we don't have any fuel storage for , and hopefully would be needed very infrequently..

Good news about Greenlink. Will it get used to the maximum from day 1? ie. it will make commercial sense to import from the UK and reduce our GAS generation by as much as possible?

The UK has a cleaner grid than us so we would have to pay less in Carbon Taxes?

https://grid.iamkate.com/

Although the UK is exporting to us, they are also importing from other EU countries.

So I'm assuming they can buy from them for less than they can sell to us?

Is this basic arbitrage or is there something more complicated also involved with wholesale markets/grid capacity/carbon credits that an ordinary joe like me doesn't understand?

When the French interconnector is up and running, will we be able to get our first 700MW cheaper than currently? ie does French nuclear usually cost less than Norwegian hydro via UK?

Do the UK ever have their own excess (Wind?) to export ?

So many questions…

Good points and questions. The UK has much more renewables (eg offshore wind) and will export to us far more than we will export to UK. Ditto from France as long as their NP plants stay up. Check out UK plans for feeding excess Scottish wind down the North Sea, to SE England. UK is now building very many Data Centres so big future demand is being met from their booming assets. I guess Greenlink will export at times to southern UK - eg when we have wind and the North Sea is calm.

This week's question.

According to Irish Energy Bot, on Sunday at 01:00, Renewables and Pumped Storage made up 90% of generation at 01:00.

Renewable generation and pumped storage equalled 66% of yesterday's electricity demand, with a peak of 90% at 01:00. Fossil fuel generation (mostly gas) equalled 35% of demand. 6% of generation was exported, 5% of demand was met by imports.

According to the Eirgrid presentation in the previous post, the grid at the moment can operate up to 75% SNSP.

Turlough Hill is 292MW and at 01:00, system demand is 3.8GW, so it would have been providing 7.5%. There's a 7.5% gap; what am I missing?

I see grid level battery storage is increasing dramatically across the world as expected as solar has rocketed.

Interesting podcast on the Netherlands where they have 70Gw of battery storage projects on the waiting list to connect in :

The solar march seems unstoppable now

Was wondering this myself .. the average nuclear plant in the US generates 1Gw of instantaneous power and therefore 24Gwh over one day ( both of these could be expressed in Tw and Twh - makes no difference except where the decimal point goes)

The article I quoted gives only the instantaneous power for the battery storage I think and you are correct this is not the full story .. this article here talks about U.S. installing 3 GW / 10.5 GWh of energy storage in Q2. If the ratio is the same then the total batteries are giving

21Gw = 21 nuclear power stations

and over one day

73Gwh =~ 3 nuclear power stations

Not as flattering but they are not designed to be used like that and my math may be wrong here.

It looks like from 8am to 4pm yesterday, commercial solar outperformed wind. If you include domestic solar, perhaps it outperformed it over the 24 hours?

https://twitter.com/IrishEnergyBot/status/1851527725783097421/photo/1

Should have read Angela's Ashes before you moved back cnocbui.

Carnsore Point is where you need to be 🙂

Location with the most sunshine in Ireland and good 20/38kV infrastructure so we should have more than a single 8MW solar farm in that area. Lots of lovely beaches where you can walk and wonder what might have been if the NPP had been built. And for an added bonus, it's the nearest point in Ireland to Australia. But mainly because of the sunshine, more sunshine than anywhere else in the country and 25% more than many places where solar farms are being built.

One reason is probably because it's either all good land or bird wetlands around there. From the satellite view, you can see how many fields are tilled. It's a tougher business proposition then to persuade a landowner to lease that productive land for a solar farm.

We are well into the fifth day of a dunkelflaute. Wind is only supplying 5.6% of current demand. Offshore wind might improve matters slightly, but there is no prospect whatsoever of batteries mattering or making a meaningful difference to a 5 days straight, near windless period. Grid batteries do hours, not days, and despite the lttle bleats of joy about falling battery prices every time someone somewhere adds a few GWh worth of storage, batteries will never be cheap enough to supply the majority of our grid demand for multiple days.

Every time I see mention of interconnectors these days it's only in the context of an import mechanism - gone is the notion of them being primarily for exporting shamrock-oil - excess wind.

Wind is Ireland's equivalent of Saudi oil reserves - what a laugh.

An energy policy built on the presumption of non-self-sufficiency is stupid, but unsurprising when the likes of ER are elevated above their level of incompetency.