Energy infrastructure

What realistic solution are you proposing that doesn't leave Irish Consumers/taxpayers picking up the bill through cross accounting. Don't give them the idea of justification on the basis of Defence as that will just give them excuse to tap another vein of funding from the Irish taxpayer.

first time I heard of it so interesting find alright

Back of envelope calculation for a turlough hill type setup with the claimed 2.5x storage capacity by using this mystery fluid

Turlough Hill 22m pounds in 1974 that’s 300m euro inflation adjusted today

1590 MWh storage capacity with water that falls out of sky

3975 MWh storage capacity with unknown “dense” liquid of unknown cost and lifespan and toxicity (which would have to be trucked up a mountain)

So a third of a billion for just under 4GWh of storage at absolute minimum, obviously there are unknown costs here and questions not answered by press release

Now how many GWh would Ireland need in a week where there’s little to no wind or sun in winter?

Once we have that we can get minimal cost and try to find similar hills

whatever this mysterious “R-19” fluid is it’s ringing alarm bells for me

What would happen if this gets into waterways by accident or deliberately

Think heavy crude oil tanker spills where parts of the crude oil are only slightly denser than water sink (while less dense float) and cause havoc, this is is claimed to be much denser than that

fracking fluids and fracking for gas was banned almost Europe wide and that fluid for most parts uses water with sand suspension and “polymers”

Norwegian Timber Ship Will be First to Use Wartsila’s Ammonia Engine https://share.google/45n7bGqmNj74VMXIZ

Slightly sideways , but ammonia is probably an easier energy store than hydrogen, definitely easier to transfer , and the equipment to transfer it and convert hydrogen to ammonia already exists

There are trials going on in Australia i think ,to synthesise ammonia directly from water - without going to hydrogen first -

Good luck with that.

the current achieved round-trip efficiency of electricity-ammonia-electricity ranges from 18.71 to 33.03 %.

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0360319925037838

You wouldn't be value adding, you would be losing it vs selling the original electricity or finding a more efficient use for it. All this talk of ammonia as an energy carrier is likely to evaporate over time, just as the H hype has. It's a really rotten fuel and energy store. The best thing to do with it is to make ammonium nitrate. However, even that is likely to come unstuck when the economics hits the road. If the resulting fertiliser ends up being more expensive than making it from other sources, your taxes are either going to have to increase to subsidise the cost to farmers or the cheaper option will prevail.

Making ammonia from excess green electricity isn't a done thing as a normalised commercial industrial process so the chances of this happening are zero unless that changes.

Look at France. They have more excess green electricity than any other country in the EU. They do the obviously sensible thing and sell it to other countries, generating billions in income every year.

The EU countries bordering the med for some reason have a knack for delivering all sorts of infrastructure projects (not just energy)

Compare France

Against similarly sized Germany whom have to buy heavily from France and whose energy co2 production is still multiple times higher than France despite spending multiples of France on “Energiewende”

as can be illustrated live right here

So still cheaper than Germans we are emulating here, whom have been at it for 2.5 decades now and still emit multiples of CO2 per unit in of electricity while having to import energy and have some of the highest prices in world

IMHO we should be learning from French, Italians and Spanish all about how to build infrastructure be it clean and cheap electricity (or metro systems or high speed rail) instead of trying to replicate German failures in Ireland

Germany had the small matter of reunification to pay for, the single largest transfer of capital in human history. West Germany essentially had to completely rebuild a country with three times the population of Ireland, all by itself and while remaining the largest contributor to the EU budget to help rebuild all the other Eastern European states decimated by communism. This consumed Germany's focus and resources. There simply wasn't any more money available for energy projects which is probably why lignite is still being burned in Germany. Let's say they had their hands fairly full.