Energy infrastructure

gossamerfabric · 10-11-2024 12:40AM

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/122822228#Comment_122822228

It throttles supply between mini substation adjacent to the car parks and the chargers. In a company which is going 100% EV the infrastructure at the car parks is adaptive…which is all great except cars aren't charged to 100% going home and some people have a 200km round trip each day. The logistics of this are considerable. The PHEVs are blocked from charging on the chargers coded to be high speed EV chargers by rights assigned to RFID cards but infrastruture is only being added gradually as the fleet of EVs grow…but that is beside the point…the local grid can't support the demand between EVs and Datacentres in the locality and it is a wealthy area so more heat pumps are being installed. In Summer there is usually good contribution from rooftop and commercial solar on a small scale and large scale level but not in winter and the wind resource here is pitiful all year round. There were two nuclear plants nearby and both are shut down.

gjim · 10-11-2024 07:57AM

What has that to do with grid capacity? A company doesn’t provision enough charging capacity in its car park? Nothing to do with the electricity mix at all and certainly nothing to do with wind turbines.

MightyMunster · 10-11-2024 09:19AM

Not many EVs need 100% range for a 100km drive home either. >30% would do for pretty much any EV sold in the last 5yrs

Markcheese · 10-11-2024 09:27AM

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/122820058#Comment_122820058

Yeah , effectively it's diesel, but that's a back up in the existing gas fired generators, in case there's a minor problem with gas supply , also most of the gas turbines aren't designed to run on diesel long term , it'll wreck the plant , I think most are 10 days max or something,

gossamerfabric · 10-11-2024 11:38AM

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/122822512#Comment_122822512

The local papers last year reported that the grid is constrained in the locality and can't cope with the demand.

Internal facility management sent mails around to staff noting that build out of charging infrastructure on campus will be delayed as the local grid simply can't support the increased demand from our Company. Where charging infrastructure is in place it is being throttled as the grid can't supply the campus with enough electricity.

We draw huge amounts of electricity, have built more datacentres here and from January of next year nobody will be allowed order anything but a BEV or long range PHEV. Thousands of company cars will be replaced with BEVs and PHEVs.

gossamerfabric · 10-11-2024 11:41AM

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/122822512#Comment_122822512

The Colleagues sometimes say to me, Oh, it is windy today and I have to tell them that this is but a light breeze compared to what we get in Ireland. It is one thing to blight the landscape to reap the winds in Ireland but the landscape is being blighted with Turbines around here with no decent wind resource to harness.

Busman Paddy Lasty · 10-11-2024 11:54AM

If the grid capacity isn't enough it doesn't matter if the electricity is renewable, gas or coal.

Some data centres in Ireland have on site gas powered generators because the local grid supply isn't enough. This had absolutely nothing to do with wind power. Cables and transformers, the physical infrastructure just isn't there.

gossamerfabric · 10-11-2024 12:11PM

it has everything to do with wind power when in winter no local alternatives are available and demand for a scarce resource is increasing. There is simply not enough electricity being provisioned to serve the increased demand. gas, brown coal, coal, nuclear, oil are all off the menu.

Busman Paddy Lasty · 10-11-2024 12:14PM

There is simply not enough electricity distribution network being provisioned to serve the increased demand. gas, brown coal, coal, nuclear, oil are all off the menu.

This is the case according to your earlier post about not enough grid infrastructure.

gossamerfabric · 10-11-2024 12:41PM

Note from our Car Fleet to employees "Dear colleagues, the electrical power that the local grid for XXXXXXXX can currently supply is limited. We expect an improvement here in 2025. "

The local grid is not able to supply and that is an infrastructure problem at both local and macro level. Transitioning to a grid composed of a high percentage of renewable sources is neither cheap nor uncomplicated. Throttling the supply to the EVs is all that can be done to prevent brownouts in the datacentres or local villages.

There are monitors for the locality like eirgrid dashboards which show the mix of sources for electricity on the grid. Wind and Solar are contributing next to nothing at the moment, hydro is minimal while nuclear, gas, brown coal, coal, oil are nigh on verboten so we are importing nuclear across the borded which is somewhat OK in winter but when the rivers are low during drought(not necessarily summer) that drops off too. The attitude of "wir schaffen das" on this forum in the face of all the challenges is not one anchored in reality.

My Colleagues mostly don't want to switch to EVs and only considerable tax breaks and company incentives are easing the transition for them. Wondering whether your car will be charged at the end of the day is just another unpleasant element of EV ownership.

This is a report from the coalface of the Energy transition that you have been sheltered from so far…it is all there for you to look forward to over the next 15 years. Don't expect the price of electricity per kWh to drop any time soon as the network basically has to be totally rebuilt to cope with intermittent sources of power unable to provide baseload.

gossamerfabric · 10-11-2024 12:45PM

Stick this in your pipe and smoke it:

Shocking electricity costs mean we should pull plug on offshore wind

https://archive.is/UeqW3

bk · 10-11-2024 12:46PM

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/122822873#Comment_122822873

Non of that has anything to do with a dunkelflaute, unless you literally have a wind farm in your business park!!

What could be happening is that your company has signed up to a demand management plan with their electricity provider for the EV chargers. Basically it allows the electricity supplier to throttle down the EV chargers at the times of high demand in return for cheaper electricity prices. Purely a business decision.

Sure there can certainly be bottlenecks in the local grid, which will stop you from installing new chargers or a new Datacenter. Your company will work with Eirgrid to upgrade the local grid infrastructure to handle the increased demand.

I find it wild that some people think it is some big deal that parts of the grid might need upgrading. While of course it is work to be done and there can be challenges, it is far from unusual or rocker science. Hell we electrified the whole of rural Ireland back in the 60's when Ireland was broke. By comparison some grid upgrades in constrained areas is hardly a big deal!

Also people don't seem to realise that even if you didn't need upgrades, infrastructure has to be replaced every few decades anyway. That goes for the electricity infrastructure, water infrastructure, telecoms, etc.

gossamerfabric · 10-11-2024 12:53PM

We are not working with Eirgrid…and EVERYTHING can be done at a cost in monetary and inconvenience terms.

The general public don't know where they will be dragged but vested interests wish to drag them along the way until they have reached a point of no return.

Busman Paddy Lasty · 10-11-2024 01:03PM

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/122823125#Comment_122823125

I don't have a pipe and I don't smoke. Burning stuff is bad for you!

We can have Dunkelflauten 😁 or we can continue with Gasverbrennungsökonomie.

Choose your poison because gas will out some day and the cost of it will rise year on year until it's gone.

KrisW1001 · 10-11-2024 02:13PM

Dunkelflauten if you must pluralise it as a German noun.

@gossamerfabric where is "here", exactly? A country will do.

Your story sounds like the Datacentre is expanding its capacity by cutting back power for other on-site services (rule of thumb for an average cabinet is 5 kW; a car charger is 7 or 11 kW) . I suspect they underestimated demand from employees for EV charging. Making staff pay for that electricity would have fixed the problems: you'd be amazed how people are suddenly able to prganise their home-charging routine to avoid needing to charge at work once they have to actually pay for the workplace chargers.

gossamerfabric · 10-11-2024 02:24PM

I think you mean a Substantiv not a noun and I am referring to a single instance so I am using the singular.

https://de.wiktionary.org/wiki/Dunkelflaute

Making the staff pay for their charging would be an adjustment to the terms and conditions of employment and would not be allowed by the works council. Home charger installation is paid for by the company and power used paid by the company. My Colleague next to me is actually paid for his electricity going in to the car even though it is being produced on his roof so he maximises it.

As the majority live in near commuting distance that doesn't alleviate the demand on the local infrastructure.

Disincentivising charging in the park houses will just drive the employees to use their charge cards at fast chargers at considerable expense to the company.

The Greens would have you believe that decarbonizing transport is easy as pie…it isn't.

tom1ie · 10-11-2024 02:37PM

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/122820058#Comment_122820058

Which is located on an island with no pipeline infrastructure to bring the oil to the mainland.

KrisW1001 · 10-11-2024 03:01PM

@gossamerfabric No, I'm correct. I chose the word "Noun" because I was writing in English. In any case that wasn't a reply to you: it was to the previous poster's use of "Dunkelflaüte". Personally, I prefer to pluralise loanwords as regular English nouns, so I would write "dunkelflautes" (wenn es etwas wert ist, ich kann deutsch sprechen)

Speaking of, as you didn't answer the question I asked you, I'll have to guess. So, from references to the works council, park houses and the capitalisation and use of the word "Colleague" I'll say that you are in Germany... am I right?

gossamerfabric · 10-11-2024 03:21PM

I don't think it is an accepted loan word yet becuase it isn't in the OED or Collins dictionary.

KrisW1001 · 10-11-2024 05:08PM

It's a loanword because it's a word from a foreign language that is now being used in English. As for plurals, a brief online paper search shows that many English-language writers are treating “Dunkelflaute” as a both the singular and plural form of a countable noun (“A Dunkelflaute…” / “these events, known as ‘Dunkelflaute’…”).

I’ve heard the anglicised “Dunkelflautes” in speech, and, it has to be said, I’ve also heard the hypercorrection “Dunkelfläute” used by people who should really should know better (in that they were able to pronounce the -äu- diphthong correctly)…

None of this is particularly relevant to discussing the energy infrastructure of Ireland, though. #

Was my guess right?

gossamerfabric · 11-11-2024 09:59AM

thanks but when it appears in OED then we will call it a loan word but until then it will stay a german word like besserwisser.

KrisW1001 · 11-11-2024 12:25PM

Speaking personally, I would not try to pick a fight about the details of how foreign words are assimilated into formal German, because I am not a native speaker, am not familiar with current usages, and I have had no experience either as a writer or editor in that language.

I'd be interested in your further thoughts on Energy Infrastructure.

Sam Russell · 11-11-2024 01:42PM

Mod: Can we drop the German language lessons?

Plurals in English are bad enough. We have referendums and referenda confusion. Just because a word ends in -um does not mean the plural takes the form of -a, it could (and usually does) take the form -ums. The expression 'ba in seats' sounds wrong.

gossamerfabric · 11-11-2024 04:44PM

dunkelflaute persists. Thank God for interconnectors.

https://www.energy-charts.info/charts/power/chart.htm?l=en&c=DE&legendItems=4x0c3fg

hans aus dtschl · 12-11-2024 10:52AM

I can't charge my car and our company made some poor business decisions.

Should I blame wind turbines or the green party for this? Or both?

And back on topic, now that the cloud and lack of wind has seemingly passed here in Cork, are we generating solar at any reasonable capacity, given the cold temperatures? I can't seem to make solar out from the Eirgrid dashboard. Is the scale still just way too small to even feature?

KrisW1001 · 12-11-2024 12:39PM

I think it's scale - we don't have a lot of grid solar here. I'm not sure we really should go big into solar farms for grid use. Instead, I think the use of on-premises solar to suppress grid demand is a better use for the technology at our latitude.

Solar is one of the few electricity generation systems that scales down efficiently: capacity factors for a home/industrial PV installation are pretty much the same as for grid-connected farms, and there's far lower transport losses when the electricity is travelling less than 100 metres within a premises rather than being transformed up to HVAC for transmission over hundreds of kilometres…

Apogee · 12-11-2024 01:09PM

In a surprising turnaround, Ofgem UK have given the green light to the LirIC NI-GB 700MW interconnector as well as the Maresconnect 750MW IRL-GB IC.

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cp35x043p3xo?at_format=link&at_bbc_team=editorial

https://www.rhyljournal.co.uk/news/24717254.new-undersea-link-will-come-ashore-bodelwyddan-approved/

In an earlier report, Ofgem looked set to reject both projects from the cap and floor regime.

Another large solar project in Kildare is seeking planning approval - 118 MW over 428 acres.

https://www.rte.ie/news/business/2024/1111/1480367-plans-lodged-for-141m-solar-farm-for-site-in-co-kildare/

Construction of a gas injection facility for biomethane has started in Mitchelstown

https://www.rte.ie/news/business/2024/1029/1477872-construction-begins-on-biomethane-cgi-facility-in-cork/

Mentioned previously above how ORESS2 auction (Tonn Nua - Waterford coast) would take place early next year, but this report also mentions that ORESS3 (Lí Ban - South Coast) will likely take place before end of 2025.

https://www.rte.ie/news/business/2024/1107/1479661-second-offshore-wind-auction-announced-for-next-year/