Energy infrastructure

The competition includes competition from suppliers on the continent, via improved interconnections: we become more tightly integrated with the European energy market, and that makes it harder to price-gouge. Our domestic wind-energy producers will be trying to sell into that market, but they are also going to be competing with continental solar and wind (and, to a lesser extent, nuclear energy; nuclear rarely contributes to surplus, exportable energy)

Gas still stays around (nobody serious is talking about an energy mix with 0% gas - not yet), but it's there for those rare events when nobody has spare energy to sell to us.

Everyone else seems to have been caught up in the gas v wind debate. I'm curious why you think a state system will provide cheaper electricity. If that was the case the ESB would be winning all of the supply tenders.

I think history has shown that public sector inefficiency is a much bigger cost to consumers than the profits of private businesses.

We will be limited on the continental import amounts by the capacity of our interconnecters.
Anything over that amount will be price gouged.

Perfect is the enemy of good.

So what if we occasionally saturate our interconnector capacity. Sometimes we will be doing that by exporting energy: every Megawatt-hour we sell is profit that the generator doesn't have to charge Irish customers for. Overall, the competition puts downward pressure on pricing.

But if you imagine that Irish electricity is every going to get to the low prices of densely-populated European countries that are highly interconnected with their neighbours, then you'll be disappointed. Living on an island comes with costs.

One of our costs is distribution: our dispersed rural population means our low-voltage (230V) network is disproportionately large in comparison with our transmission network. That means more power loss, and higher costs. We either decide that this is an acceptable price to pay for living this way, or we live closer together to make it cheaper: either is an equally valid choice.

What’s cheaper? Wind is less than half the price of gas, even after price-supports for wind generators. There's no myth.

Right now, we've expensive transport and very expensive generation. We'll move to cheaper generation and expensive transport, but a lot of our generation will be in rural areas which will offset some of that transportation cost.

From your post it would seem that there are intrinsic costs to gas that mean it can never be as low as wind. So as long as there is 1 gas generator active on the grid, we will not get the full cost benefit of wind/solar. Which is why I asked earlier, are Synchronous Condensers the only viable option to eliminate gas from our grid ?

Plot the price of gas against our energy prices over the last 20 years....and you will still blame wind, because I feel you aren't interested in thinking about the problem, only in having your existing beliefs validated.

And have a look at where we get our energy from right now : how is the ownership of the fossil fuel supply market? Lots of family-run gas fields ensuring healthy competition, right? Shame that those "families" are monarchs and oligarchs controlling totalitarian states that aren't above playing politics with energy sales...

When Russia or Qatar price-gouges us on gas, it's just peachy, I suppose, but in your view we'll have less control over companies within our borders operating under our laws?

Does the auction system need to change to take account of strategic interests -

Having a lot of older - less efficient - but very necessary generation available for either that calm fortnight or Christmas week costs money , so the likes of moneypoint, tarbert even aghada 1, so they have to charge a fortune to cover their yearly costs and profit , before adding in the fuel . But when they charge a small fortune to power up for a week or two , the more efficient often closed cycle stations get that vast sum as well , which seems counter intuitive,

Germany no wind or solar currently !

https://x.com/Schuldensuehner/status/1854560427633422494

& another ...Your November reminder to hope for a windy, wet, and warm winter. The first Dunkelflaute of the 2024-25 season forced a large withdrawal of gas from storage. With storage at ~95% at the start of the season, one Dunkelflaute and/or cold snap isn't a problem. Multiple will be.

There is a separate market/mechanism to pay for holding capacity in reserve. I don't know much about it, but my understanding is that these guys are getting paid for just being available - and, in return, when called on to provide electricity cannot just bid whatever they want.

For the ahead-of-time market, I'm not what you could do to change it - I can't see how having multiple settlement prices would work. Also there's an argument that these occasional high prices provide a valuable market signal. They create an incentive for competition to enter the market - particularly for sources which are uncorrelated with wind like solar and batteries as they will be around to pick up a premium when wind isn't delivering.

And anyway, as more more modern/cheaper capacity is added - wind, solar and batteries - even with variance, the amount of time when these legacy generators have to fire up gets smaller and smaller.

local grid can't supply enough electricity to the cars in the company car parks so they are being throttled and staff complaining their cars aren't charged in the evening

Explain this one to me?