Wind farms - ugly truths

"In other words the ESB continues to burn dirty but cheap coal and peat, in favour of much cleaner, but slightly more expensive natural gas!!!!"


Is peat cheap ? I thought most of the pso levy went towards that !! -

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-wales-south-west-wales-34531680

I'd love the Esb to build something like this instead of converting money point - ain't gonna happen either though -

Markcheese wrote: »

"In other words the ESB continues to burn dirty but cheap coal and peat, in favour of much cleaner, but slightly more expensive natural gas!!!!"


Is peat cheap ? I thought most of the pso levy went towards that !! -

not any more it doesnt

We can see that for the first time renewables, mostly wind, has overtaken peat and is now the largest recipient of the PSO Levy - 57% of the levy is going to renewables for the year 2015/16.


http://irishenergyblog.blogspot.ie/2015/06/pso-levy-wind-energy-prevents-consumers.html

Capt'n Midnight wrote: »

[from the coal thread]

Gas plants have shorter lives than most other generators and most of the costs are for fuel so it's not like gas requires the same sort of long term investment that nuclear, hydro, tidal or pumped storage do. While wind isn't cheap to build , it is very cheap to refurbish compared to most other generators other than hydro, and there is a good market for second hand turbines abroad. Most of the economics for wind are based on a 20 year life when it could easily be doubled.

Refurbishing for nuclear in a lot of cases means fixing design or construction flaws and/or updating to current safety standards rather than just replacing parts at their service interval. Overruns in time and cost are frequent as is finding out the reactor was in a worse state than had been anticipated.

Projects I'd like to see
NI building that CAES plant in the salt mines.
Tidal turbines in NI.
Welsh tidal lagoon.
Scotland Norway interconnector.

Energy to gas.

BTW
Latest solar news is that they've made rectennas. So possibly at some distant stage in the future 40% conversion efficiency. you see that's the thing with renewables , unlike nuclear there many potentially game changing technologies that have been proven in the lab.
http://spectrum.ieee.org/nanoclast/semiconductors/materials/optical-rectenna-could-doube-solar-cell-efficiency

there are nuclear plants in France going for 40 years !

what utter propaganda there is on boards.ie

Capt'n Midnight wrote: »

It's not really good.

It's just the old mantra of wind is bad because you can't turn anytime you like and so you have to rely on dispatchable power.

It completely misses the bleedin' obvious point that if you have dispatchable power you can plan to turn it on whenever the five day ahead weather forecast says there's not much wind ahead. In fact because of the need for reserve you can turn it on once you get a few seconds warning. And it would be a very small wind farm that takes only a few seconds for a weather front to cross it , nevermind multiple farms across the island.



It's like me saying I could save petrol by cycling to work on dry days and you saying that I should drive every single day in case of rain. Instead of listening to you I'll just look at the weather forecast and cycle in on good days.


Now the thing is if I get caught in the rain I can always hail a taxi. So I won't ever get wet. And there will always be a taxi,in seconds, because we have a surplus of dispatchable generators and spinning reserve.

Maybe your missing the obvious "bleedin" point that on top of spells like the current one where wind has contributed very little to the power system for weeks now, there is also the issue of extreme variablilty accross even a windy day with peaks and troughts at various intervals across every individual wind farm at different unpredictable times which adds further complexity to managing the grid. Even the most accurate and detailed wind forecasts cannot predict such a huge range of variability in such time and space. Our topograhy and geographical positioning means wind across this island is often of a gusty nature and is rarely steady,unlike the type of onshore wind seen in other parts of Europe such as near the straits of Gibraltor etc. . This has obvious conquences for the operation of moneypoint, peat-fired power stations etc. that will always be the spine of our grid system compared to the unreliable outputs of wind farms. The link to the analysis I posted earlier from Irishenergy blog of actual costs and emmission outputs on such a system highlights the dubious economics, outputs etc. of wind farms on the Irish grid.

Of the 7 billion 3 hundred thousand odd on the planet now - how many have our (western) energy useage- how many are aspiring to it - what will the worlds energ/electricity requirements be in 20 years time ?
There isn't enough room for it all to be biomass- I dunno if anybody (bar the Aussies :-) ) want that much coal to be burnt - there's only so much gas to go around -
So to keep the motoring/ cycling analogy going :
If you have a car but a limited amount of petrol - then use the bike when you can - as the petrol becomes more limited in the future you'll need to plan on more bike journeys -

Capt'n Midnight wrote: »

It's like me saying I could save petrol by cycling to work on dry days and you saying that I should drive every single day in case of rain. Instead of listening to you I'll just look at the weather forecast and cycle in on good days.


Now the thing is if I get caught in the rain I can always hail a taxi. So I won't ever get wet. And there will always be a taxi,in seconds, because we have a surplus of dispatchable generators and spinning reserve.

Your anaolgy misses some key points:

1. The "bicycle" in your anaolgy has to be subsidised out the wazoozoo, because it's so expensive it wouldn't work without them. It also has to be parked 300 metres above a scenic mountaintop along with hundreds of others, each on a massive plinth set in tons of concrete, and each kill huge amounts of bats and birds because it's just so awful, and over time begins to attract massive NIMBY opposition for those reasons.
2. You do not save any need for road space for cars, because when it's predicted to rain, everyone's going to get in their car anyway, so all the roads and motorways have to be built for that eventuality. No money saved there.
3. The same is true of your car - the main costs of a car are road tax and insurance, VRT, NCT Testing fees, VAT and levies on all of the above. Most of this is fixed costs, leaving the car in driveway won't save you anything on those. Only fuel and some wear and tear can be saved.
4. The same is true of the taxi only it's much worse: In order for there to be a taxi driver waiting for you when it starts to rain unexpectedly, the taxi driver must be earning enough money to remain in the taxi business, that means he must either be subsidised, or must make so muuch during the unplanned rains ... that your fare very high to keep him in the market when most of his time is idle, if the "stuck in an unexpected rainstorm" crowd is his only market. That would also be a peak demand period anyway so you would have difficulty getting a taxi in the firstplace because everyone else would have the same idea. The taxi driver would also have to carry your bicycle (windmills etc are a drain on the grid when they're stopped).

To continue your analogy, consider if the government planned a massive investment in railway infrastructure and trains back in the 1970s (including Metro and Dart in Dublin, trams in Cork, Galway and Limerick, and high speed Intercity rail between the main cities. To that end, they intended to establish a train and tram factory in Carnsore Point along with the associated rail forging foundaries to supply a national railway programme.

Had it worked, the country would have imported dramatically less fossil fuels since the 1970s, and much less CO2 would have been emitted over the last 40 years.

But a bunch of well meaning but misguided individuals descended on the place and set up a protest camp, denouncing trains as evil and that bicycles were the greatest, end of. Tacitly, they also promote cars and motorways by the back door. The railway programme is cancelled and people spend the next 40+ years driving everywhere, importing massive amounts of fossil fuel and creating vast quantites of air pollution and CO2 emissions, all which were completely and utterly avoidable. The bicycles get a little bit more efficient over the following 40+ years but other than that, very little changes.

Birdnuts wrote: »

Maybe your missing the obvious "bleedin" point that on top of spells like the current one where wind has contributed very little to the power system for weeks now, there is also the issue of extreme variablilty accross even a windy day with peaks and troughts at various intervals across every individual wind farm at different unpredictable times which adds further complexity to managing the grid. Even the most accurate and detailed wind forecasts cannot predict such a huge range of variability in such time and space.

Maybe you could explain why the operators of the national grid should be concerned about wind speed variability at the level of an individual wind farm?

djpbarry wrote: »

I’ve lost track of how many times you’ve said this, but I’m still waiting for you to produce some figures to back it up.
That doesn’t surprise me, given that you’ve dismissed virtually every single fact and figure produced on this thread that doesn’t support your argument, whilst producing scant evidence of your own.

There is no correlation between CO2 reductions and wind farm capacity, apart from Denmark which cant be compared with the Irish system

djpbarry wrote: »

I’ve lost track of how many times you’ve said this, but I’m still waiting for you to produce some figures to back it up.
That doesn’t surprise me, given that you’ve dismissed virtually every single fact and figure produced on this thread that doesn’t support your argument, whilst producing scant evidence of your own.

That's a bit rich given your "wind power at any cost mantra" which fails badly on any measure of performane and your dismissal of proven emission reduction measures such as retrofit schemes, conversion of peat/coal plants to cleaner gas, sustaineable biomass etc.

http://www.ors.ie/moneypoint-could-meet-25-of-renewable-energy-goal-expert/

http://www.technologyreview.com/news/527106/how-and-why-us-greenhouse-gas-emissions-are-falling/

As Fclauson pointed out before, the Dept of Energy has so far failed/refused to do a CBA of wind power on the Irish Grid - I wonder why??

Fabo wrote: »

There is no correlation between CO2 reductions and wind farm capacity, apart from Denmark which cant be compared with the Irish system

That statement makes virtually no sense.

djpbarry wrote: »

Maybe you should consider the long-term trend, rather than focussing on a single data point:
http://www.eea.europa.eu/publications/ghg-trends-and-projections-2012/denmark.pdf

CO2 emmissions have declined in general across the EU(and much of the Western world) in the last 25 year. Mainly due to the closing of old dirty factories and in other cases the movement of heavy industry outside the EU due to high energy prices and labour costs as in the case of the British steel industry. Energy efficiency technologies have also played a big role in this space across homes,transport and business. The point is that this has happened across the board and is in no way related to a country's level of installed wind capacity. That is why spikes in Denmarks and Germany's CO2 emissions in recent years make for an interesting discussion.

djpbarry wrote: »

Bollocks.

This graph is taken from the document I linked to above – allow me to draw your attention to the dark blue line, representing emissions pertaining to energy supply:

Classy - Your graph actually shows energy emmissions little changed since 1990 so your initial arguement doesn't hold much water. I would be interested to know what caused the massive spike in energy emmissions in the mid-90's and then the sharp fall within 2-3 years, though it was around that time they built
interconnectors to Scandi hydro power etc. - and still depends heavily on this source alot of the time, which luckily for it are low CO2 energy sources. You graph also shows that general energy use has declined by nearly a third which was the point I was making in terms of energy saving technology.


Edit: Actually it appears the sharp drop in emmissions in the late 90's also conceded with the increased replacement of coal with natural gas in Denmarks energy supply. Something which has also helped other countries like the US sharply drop their CO2 emmissions in recent years as I showed earlier.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_in_Denmark#/media/File:Fossil_fuel_consumption_in_Denmark.svg


Also Denmarks "wind performance" depends heavily on its ability to dump excess wind generation on windy days onto neighbouring grids

http://euanmearns.com/wind-power-denmark-and-the-island-of-denmark/

"estimated that only about half of the wind power generated in Denmark between 2000 and 2007 was actually consumed in Denmark)."

also and most tellingly

"But the key to Denmark’s high level of wind penetration is its location on the Nordic Grid between its larger neighbors Norway, Sweden and Germany, who between them generated 26 times as much electricity as Denmark in 2013. This gives Denmark access to an additional 5,820MW of interconnector capacity that it makes full use of (Figure 2):

Which shines a totally different light on the Danish grid as one that is heavily dependent on its neighbours to keep the lights, despite spending vast amounts on wind power, which is reflected in the fact that it has the highest retail energy costs in the EU.