Energy infrastructure

Looks like 'clipping' today to me. Do we need bigger inverters :) ?

You're right, we really could do with that offshore wind today.

You do not understand the information you are posting, if that’s the conclusion you’ve drawn. Yes, the disconnection of renewable generation (step 2 on your middle infographic) was one step in the cycle that repeated to cause the problem, but renewable generation itself did not trigger this issue: the grid was stable with renewables connected before the event, but became further destabilised when they were removed. The report I linked to has the details, and a series of recommendations to avoid a similar collapse in future.

…and private on-site generation is predominantly gas-fired combined heat and power systems.

Our high domestic electricity prices does make home PV a no-brainer. The government appears to be in a bit of a bind, of its own making, to miss the 2030 targets by as little as possible and not have to spend billions buying carbon credits.

National-scale projects in Ireland just take too long to get started and delays are too easily accepted. The Celtic interconnector supposedly missed the summer window 2 years ago delaying commissioning until 2026 at the time but now we've got a further 2 years of delay due to cable manufacture issues outside their control.

The longer projects take, the more opportunity there is for them to be beset by further delays.

Offshore wind probably won't be operational until 2033 at best, let's be realistic.

On shore wind will see some incremental increase in the next 5 years with repowering of older farms, but it's not going to make as big a dent in our emissions as offshore wind.

Synchronous condensors will hopefully allow us get to 80% SNSP and beyond, but how far beyond? 95% is often mentioned but will the condensors currently being installed allow us to get all the way there?

The only game in town at the moment that I can see is domestic solar and the government are likely to keep it highly subsidised with grants and zero VAT. The problem I have with this is that investing in private domestic infrastructure by way of grants benefits those already well enough off to own their own homes. It also encourages housing development over apartments and the resulting urban sprawl will bring with it its own infrastructural issues.

I would like to see the government investing more in national-level energy infrastructure that benefits everyone equally.

What percentage of rooftops would be considered saturated and how would it vary from south to north? There are still a lot of unused rooftops. This is a random village in Bavaria, Aug 2025.

In a market with adequate supply, the presence of solar panels is something that would command a premium, as letters would prefer most efficient properties to rent, and properties without would command a lower price. However, in the Irish market right now, landlords don’t have any incentive to spend €7-10k on solar when any kind of property at all will command a high rent simply by existing.

“Warm rent” and “cold rent” are German concepts that are meaningless in the Irish market. Here, the price advertised for the property is the price that will be paid by the tenant - there is no concept of Nebenkosten on tenancies here. Even where heat or electricity are included (a very rare situation), there will be no breakdown by the landlord of how much of the monthly rent is going to fund these services. The lessee pays to live in the property, and they then separately pay for whatever the landlord didn’t include.

The landlord almost always pays property taxes, building service fees and things like lift or structural maintenance, but that’s also not broken out in the tenancy pricing: the rent is only ever presented as a total, and the tenant decides to pay it or not.

But that’s a diversion from the point: the economics of letting mean that there is no incentive for any landlord to invest in improving a property until the lack of that investment affects the ability to let the property.

It would not have been a subsidy, because the tenant would pay for the use of the solar power facility as part of their rent, much as they pay for efficient air conditioning, insulation or triple-glazed windows: it feeds into a lower running cost. If there’s only one tenant in the building, it would be relatively straightforward to manage.

I can see two reasons, though: one technical, and the other legal.

First, the technical: not all of IDA’s buildings are rented exclusively to one tenant, and managing shared solar in a multi-tenancy commercial building gets awkward: each company has its own metering point and its own electricity bill. So divvying out the solar power to each customer within the building would require a relatively complex power management system, which could still result in under-used solar generation.

The alternative is that solar is used for the common building services (AC, lifts, light in lobbies and access areas), and the owner just collects the feed-in tariff from the surplus, but that’s not the best return on capital, not least because there’s an upper limit on feed-in (50 kW DC) for businesses that an installation of this size could easily exceed - 50 kW is only about 400 square metres of roof area. Okay, IDA could do a deal outside of the microgeneration scheme, but that raises the second problem: if it does so across its buildings, then it’s engaging in energy generation and sales, something it has no legal remit to do.

That feed limit is a big problem for a 9-to-5 occupation, as in summer time there will still be large amounts of energy being produced with nobody in the building to use it. Batteries can help, but batteries are a much poorer return on investment than just using the energy somewhere else.

There was a proposal to fit all schools with rooftop solar, so that the surplus during spring/autumn evenings and in the summer when schools are closed would result in a lower overall energy bill for the state’s property portfolio, but I suspect it has been caught up in the same legal problem: the scale of the project and its surplus would make the government a significant electricity supplier, at a cost that would undercut every other generator, given that it’s financed by sovereign debt.

Personally, I think we should just legislate to allow such uses of what is, after all, our own property, so that it becomes the norm that government-owned buildings have solar power - the money saved from buying electricity gets to be used in other areas, so we as a nation will benefit.