Energy infrastructure

Thanks.

I don’t disagree with Nuclear power, but I just don’t believe it’s a viable solution in Ireland. Our grid, and our national demand, is too small to allow an economically viable reactor (>1.5 GW) to be placed within it: remember that if we put such a large single point of failure in place, then we need alternative power sources in place to cover it if it goes off line. That's a lot of fossil fuel generators kept waiting, but more realistically it means more interconnections to the European grid. But if we’re going to need to build those interconnections anyway to cover an outage of our putative nuclear plant, why not skip building the reactor here at all, and instead chip in to an expansion of an existing nuclear site’s capacity in Europe? The costs of adding a unit to an existing site are a fraction of the costs for starting from nothing: we fund the project by agreeing to buy their electricity.

Our peak grid energy demand is currently just under 8 GW. In terms of interconnects, we’ve got about 2.5 GW already built or in construction, another 1.5 with permission granted, so by the end of the decade we would be able to supply about 50% of our current demand just from imported electricity. I’d prefer to see us with interconnection capacity higher than our peak demand, because that will allow us to become a net exporter of electricity. (This is the plan)

So even if we’re buying nuclear power from (e.g.) France, we still expand our wind - especially offshore. We use that energy to offset our imports. Given the size of what we’ve already planned, at peak wind periods we will always have large surpluses of energy, so we sell those back into the European grid. Overall, we would be a net exporter of electricity, but yes, if you follow the curve second by second, day by day, then of course there will be times when we are importing as much as 80% of our needs, but there will also be times when we are exporting as much as we’re using or more, and those times outnumber the the import periods. This is why I say that the Dunkelflaute argument is a fallacy.

Without the ability to export energy, our costs will never come down - every country with cheap electricity costs is also a net exporter of electricity. Adopting Nuclear here will not allow us to export energy unless we shift our entire energy production to Nuclear, and that's not going to happen for lots of reasons.

To continue the discussion, your option B is perfectly reasonable. If we're importing gas, it would seem far more sensible to use our own. I think the issue here may be the costs associated with capacity to extract as much as we need. But other than that it's logical. But when we have storage and are being guaranteed gas through the UK, is this one a serious worry or gamechanger? And what is the plan for when this gas runs out?

As for C, I don't see why we don't bring in LNG either. I assume the fear there is that large availability of LNG would encourage too much investment in gas. But it's an unrealistic fear. And LNG is also not an ideal long-term plan, given dependence on fossil fuel and importation (import of fuel is export of money, thus bad for our economy).

Ah I see you're using the all Ireland grid and the population as measurements. I suggest we can't do that from power generation and government expenditure/policy decisions. Let's carry on hypothetical discussions in the other thread.

Meanwhile back in this thread, does anyone have data on what degree local-scale or personal solar can dent our demand forecasts?

Construction is currently paused due to archeological investigation at clay castle beach as of about a month ago

By the time this is finished I wouldn’t be surprised we be comparing the cost to a certain children’s hospital and multiples of cycle racks in Dail 🤣

The grid is not remotely too small. You would be building these to meet the 2050 CO2 target of zero. That target encompasses the full electrification of transport and heating, requiring an absolutely massive increase in generation capacity.

Is this the one where the locals were objecting to an unknown technology? Not sure if it's the iron or the air that has them worried!

And thanks for the 40MW/4,000MWh description of a grid battery!

Grid balancing is nothing to do with drawing power from EV batteries. Instead, the car charger and grid operator can communicate to avoid demand peaks in exchange for a much lower tariff. You come home, plug in, and the grid operator makes sure you're sufficiently charged up by 0700, but they get to decide exactly when the charging happens.

(obviously, this kind of arrangement won't suit special people, but it's never a compulsory thing: if you absolutely need to charge up at peak time, you'll just pay more for the privilege)

And those employees absolutely must attach their cars to start charging at 1700 because…?

"pay more" = "pay the normal rate for peak-hours electricity". Electricity is very cheap at night because demand is so low. This is basic economics. If you get people charging their cars when demand is already far below the daytime peak rather than in the middle of it, then their actions have no little to no effect on the grid infrastructure. The grid is configured to meet the 1700-1900 peak load period - the last thing they want is more heavy loads coming on at that point.

So, if you really insist on charging your car at a time that costs the operator a lot to provide that electricity, then you have to pay for it. It's not “punitive charging”, it's the basic economics of pricing when supply is limited. Hotels get expensive when Taylor Swift plays a concert in the city, even though the week after you can have the same room for a fraction of the price. Cost (in time) of driving at 0800 is higher than at 0400, despite it being the same road, same car.

The V2G situation you describe is pretty melodramatic. I know for a fact that Germany has strong laws protecting private property: no grid operator could do anything to your battery, which is your property, without your explicit consent (This goes for everything: if you built your house, re-read your electricity contract, you’ll see theres a part where you gave them permission to bring live power cables into your property). If they want V2G, they’ll pay you for the privilege. If you prefer V2L, that’s mostly your business, although it’s also their business as you need to provide proof to them that your chosen system cannot export that power back out to the grid without proper controls.

Honestly, V2G is more trouble than its worth for a utility. Load diversion is a bigger bang for the buck from their point of view because they don’t have to do much work to facilitate it, and it lowers demand. Home batteries are a bit pointless without solar power, but even playing price arbitrage games (charge overnight; discharge in the day) helps the grid operator by suppressing the daytime peak.

There isn’t some authoritarian bogeyman punishing you - the grid operators are simply exposing you to the true costs of your energy use, and letting you make your own decisions from there. At certain times of the day, very expensive peaking generation is needed to meet demand; at night, the normal resources are sufficient. Imagine if hotels had to charge the same room-rate every night of the year, regardless of demand. That’s how electricity used to be priced, and it just meant that people who were not causing sourcing difficulties for the grid operators were subsidising those who did.

That figure is out of date: it’s more like 60 MW now. The three largest installations are Barranafaddock in the Knockmealdowns at 34 MW, Woodhouse near Rinn at 20 MW and Ballycurreen (Rinn) at 5 MW. Everything else is around the 1-2 MW range. There's untapped potential in the Comeraghs, and a 68 MW project at Coumnagappul is going through planning at the moment. A 78 MW plan at Dyrick Hill (Knockmealdowns, on the Waterford-Tipp border) was refused planning last month [ 317265 | An Bord Pleanála ].

Waterford is pretty low-lying overall - there's no upland range entirely within the county, so it’s not going to have much onshore wind capacity. Offshore is a different matter, but the best sites are overlooked by some quite rich people's coastal houses, so it’s going to be a tough slog. As for solar, there may be a good resource there, but if it’s on good farmland, it's going to be a hard sell to landowners.

You may be incorrect, according to the Farmers Journal legal expert.

https://www.farmersjournal.ie/life/features/legal-solar-farms-and-the-legal-implications-799289#:~:text=Tax%20Agricultural%20Relief-,Land%20on%20which%20solar%20panels%20are%20installed%20is%20regarded%20as,the%20gift%20or%20the%20inheritance.