Energy infrastructure

There are three floating offshore wind farms, two off Scotland and one off Norway. They are easily the most expensive form of power generation in existence, and that's before considering the extremely high turbine failure rate and short lifespans.

There is not going to be any FOSW farms built off the west coast and I'm doubtful about fixed as the two Scottish farms have shown existing turbines don't last long in those wind conditions.

Like I said ,very early days .. the conditions are obviously ridiculously harsh , and currently it's stick a regular horizontal axis wind turbine on massive floating platform,

There are a myriad of new designs and technologies in development and construction , I saw one design in las-palmas ( 1/4 size I think ) chances are only 1 or 2 designs will become the industry standards, and no matter what the urther offshore and the deeper you go ,the dearer the engineering becomes, to the point it may well make new nuclear seem reasonable..

Only if you ignore the massive impact this will have on the Marine Environment, coastal communities, coastal erosion issues etc.

When you say wind generators competing with each other who keeps an eye on this?
Will it end up like the competition we have everywhere else in Ireland EV food industry, 2nd hand car industry, new car industry, insurance industry etc?
Ie no competition or very little competition.

Right now, there is zero competition between wind producers, because they can all just set a price below whatever gas-sourced electricity costs, and they'll be quids in. It's not a cartel (there's no co-ordination between the operators - all they do is price a little below whatever gas is; and that's public information), but it still results in prices that are higher than they could be, but as more wind is connected those halcyon days will disappear, and there will be more times when the wind operators have to compete against other wind operators, not just expensive gas.

For the other things you mention, we do have competition in this country, but we also have a high cost base due to our small market (and, in the case of insurance, a court system that awards very high compensation levels for personal injury claims). Competition where there's a high embedded cost still results in high prices, unfortunately. I'm surprised you mention the second-hand car market, because that is highly competitive unless you're looking for something rare (the new car market, on the other hand…). But there is currently a supply and demand mismatch, especially for brands where most pre-owned Irish stock was excess end-of-lease cars dumped here from the UK.

Yea but there will always be an excuse for the wind operators to use to justify higher than they should be prices to the consumer.
Ie:

Oh we have a small customer base.

we don’t have indigenous wind maintenance so we have to pay extra vs Europe and Britain

The weather is extra wet and windy and affects our hardware more than Europe and Britain and hardware has to be replaced more often.

Wind will not equal cheaper electricity.
Even a private owned nuclear plant wouldn’t equal cheaper electricity.

Unless the state get involved (possibly Contravening EU competition law) we won’t get cheaper electricity prices.

Cheaper than nuclear + greener (6x less CO2 emissions than Ireland over a year) France

with 6500-7000MW of installed wind we are neither getting cheaper electricity nor reduced our emissions much

edit: or Finland for that matter whose population is not too far off the all island one

What's the lifetime of a nuclear fuel rod?

Also, this line of conversation you've been following seems to be very silly. There's loads of others having genuine non-culture-war discussions in the thread. There's about two or three of you who keep attacking straw men in every post rather than presenting any kind of realistic alternative.

You're nearly 50 posts into this username now and it's almost all weird anti-sustainable culture war dog whistling.

Can’t discuss 70 year old technologies in this thread, sorry, back to trying to find how exactly are we ever going to get cheaper electricity with wind, despite all evidence from real world showing the opposite of what is being claimed

I think the narrative might be cheaper than future high oil/gas dependent prices, that's how I see it. It shouldn't be cheaper than pre covid because change and innovation costs money. So either paid from taxes or PSO levy.

Just discuss it in the proper thread instead of whigning like Kevin and Perry.

It will be cheaper once gas loses its position as the price-setter for the market.

Here's an example where the effect might be easier to see…

I have a wholesale business where I can order a thousand mobile phones a week. I get them for €500 and sell them for €600. There are other outlets in the city that can get the same phones for just €200, but they don't get a steady supply: they get maybe a hundred a week. The total demand is around 1100 a week.

So what's the cheapest price for a phone in that city?

The answer is not €300 (their price plus the same €100 margin that I charge); it's more like €550. The people getting the phones for €200 can charge almost same price as me, because it's the same product, and the customer's alternative supplier is me, at €600. They can't charge exactly as much as I do, because then customers wouldn't bother to check if the smaller outlets had stock, as there'd be no saving to them for trying. What might surprise you is that those smaller resellers also won't charge hugely less than me, because then they would just sell out all of their stock at a much lower profit, and their business wouldn't be viable at that level of income. Meanwhile, I don't care much, because demand is 1100 a week, and we all sell everything we have, every week. But as the largest supplier, I am effectively setting the price for the commodity.

However, consider what happens if those alternative outlets start to get more supply: now, between them, they can source 600 units. I can still source up to 1000 units, but demand is still only around 1100 - something has to give. Not surprisingly, it is my sales that will drop: customers will start going to those cheaper sellers first, and only come to me as a last resort. I will have to either lower my prices to match theirs (and lose profit) or raise them slightly to cover my loss of volume (my overhead costs are still the same) and lose sales.

But something interesting also happens: customers start playing off the cheaper sellers against each other, and those sellers start reducing their prices. They can do this, because their costs are much lower than mine. They don't want to do it, but they have to because there is an overall surplus of supply, and there are other sellers with low costs who can take sales from them if they don't set their price lower. As a result, the cheapest price falls from €550 to €400. Even I'm having to sell at €550 just to stay competitive, but I know that people only come to me when the cheap sellers have run out of stock. Because I'm no longer the dominant source, and because overall available supply now exceeds demand, I have lost my ability to set the price in the market.

Eventually, as the cheaper supply continues to grow, I will be squeezed out of the main market, and instead I'll become the place that's guaranteed to have stock, but at a high price. My prices will go up dramatically to cover my overheads, but I will know that as the only guaranteed source of the commodity, when people come to me, they have exhausted all other options. Still, overall, my sales share, and my share of money spent will be tiny compared to what it was, and the average cost will be far lower than it used to be in the days when I was the dominant supplier.

Right now, we're in the first part of that story. Gas is the dominant supplier of electricity, and there is never any large surplus of energy, so gas prices set the overall price for electricity. As supply of renewables (and cheaper imports) increases, then gas will lose that dominant position, becoming the supplier of last resort; and competition between cheaper alternative sources will result in lower costs overall.

The one thing missing from your analogy is that a percentage of your phones must be sold to keep the market stable. That creates a critical dependency on you, so you won't ever be fully priced out of the market.

At the moment I think 25% of the power on the grid has to come from gas or Turlough Hill? DC interconnectors and renewables cant do it, we won't get any more hydro apart from maybe Silvermines. So that just leaves Synchronous Condensers for frequency stabilisation?