Securing energy for Ireland- how to go about it

[St Disibod]

Energy demand in Ireland is growing at a much faster rate than supply. Last year, the national grid suffered 50 amber alerts- twice as many as the previous year- and one red alert. When demand peaked at 4,700 megawatts we became reliant on wind power and electricity from Northern Ireland to maintain the flow. We cannot be assured of a windy day next time out.

Add onto this additional problems: Gazprom, Russia's semi-state gas company, has threatened to divert its supplies to new markets in the East; Ireland will have to meet its Koyoto obligations (i.e. moving all power stations off coal and peat amongst other things) or fork out sizeable fines; and the price of oil is climbing steadily and surely. We need an energy policy now!

Such a policy will have to be coherent- we can't afford to have each party wandering around with their own individual clip board of ideas and implementing them once in government. Such an action will lead to lurches in energy policy that discourage investment. For instance, wind energy and other intermittant supplies, at the most optimistic level, can only provide about 30% of our energy needs. Were a cluster of nuclear power stations to be built down the line, intermittant energy might not be needed and any private money gone into wind projects would be lossed. But in safe-guarding wind farms, and the money within, will we leave ourselves vulnerable to energy demand spikes and windless days or combinations of the two?

Interconnecters provide us with an oppurtunity to overlap our energy production and boost renewables like wind and wave- selling electricity abroad when we have an excess, and purchasing electricity when production dips or demand spikes. But this has its own problems- we will have to build more interconnecters to the European mainland; we are only finishing our first with Britain. And our energy supply will be vulnerable to the market fluctuations of other countries- something we have always ring-fenced electricity from. I suspect we are being sold free-market liberalism in the guise of green energy.

A consensus will have to be hammered out- otherwise we run the risk of either electricity blackouts or financial blackholes.

[true04]

Our green little island is not so green after all - we are the seventh ( up from eight recently ) biggest consumers of oil - an increasingly finite and valuable natural resource as we all know - per capita in the world, with the pollution that implies etc. We call the yanks gas guzzlers but they are only 30th in the world. Shame on our politicians.

[Sidewinder]

I must admit I don't get the "intermittent supply" criticism of wind etc.

Surely, surely, surely it is not beyond the ken of man to rig up some sort of big battery type job to windfarms which stores the lecky, and then releases it to the grid at a steady rate? I just can't see how such a thing would be impossible.

You observe a windfarm for a few months. You figure out the average daily output x, and the worst-case scenario of the farm not producing anything for y days. You build a storage mechanism that can hold (x*y) + 25%. Fill it up before the farm goes online. You release power from storage at x. Sorted.

Maybe? battery technology isn't up to it yet, but come on, it can hardly be an insurmoutable problem....

[St Disibod]

Maybe? battery technology isn't up to it yet, but come on, it can hardly be an insurmoutable problem....

Well, the most efficient way of storing excess electricity at the moment is to pump water up a mountain. Then, when you need energy you let the water run back down the mountain through turbines.

This comes with obvious limitations. It is an expensive and sizeable operation and far more energy goes in than you ultimately get out of it. Also, the flow is limited to the duration that the water pours down- i.e. you need a lot of water.

I'm not making this up- this is actually the kind of operation you need to launch for a super-battery. Needless to say, it's not really feasible as the solution to our energy problems.

Yes, you can store sizeable quantities of electricity in capacitors, but you don't get as much of a flow as a burst of electricity. So, unless you want street lighting in Ireland to be strobe lighting, I wouldn't recommend that either.

If giant batteries did exist, we could harness a good deal of our energy from lightning. Best keep such thinking to the Frankenstein industry.

[SPN]

Energy demand in Ireland is growing at a much faster rate than supply.

Therein lies the problem.

Last year, the national grid suffered 50 amber alerts- twice as many as the previous year- and one red alert. When demand peaked at 4,700 megawatts we became reliant on wind power and electricity from Northern Ireland to maintain the flow. We cannot be assured of a windy day next time out.

Distributed Biomass CHP is not intermittent.

Add onto this additional problems: Gazprom, Russia's semi-state gas company, has threatened to divert its supplies to new markets in the East;

And the Russian Energy Minister said, this time last year, that from about 2010 they would be ceasing to export energy as they would need all available production for their domestic market.

Ireland will have to meet its Koyoto obligations (i.e. moving all power stations off coal and peat amongst other things) or fork out sizeable fines; and the price of oil is climbing steadily and surely. We need an energy policy now!

We have one, ready to roll: Green Party Energy Policy

Such a policy will have to be coherent- we can't afford to have each party wandering around with their own individual clip board of ideas and implementing them once in government. Such an action will lead to lurches in energy policy that discourage investment.

So far Fine Gael, Sinn Fein and the PDs have adopted the Green Energy Policies as their own.

For instance, wind energy and other intermittant supplies, at the most optimistic level, can only provide about 30% of our energy needs.

What part of "Distributed Biomass CHP is not intermittent." do you not understand?

Were a cluster of nuclear power stations to be built down the line, intermittant energy might not be needed and any private money gone into wind projects would be lossed. But in safe-guarding wind farms, and the money within, will we leave ourselves vulnerable to energy demand spikes and windless days or combinations of the two?

Leaving aside the fact that Ireland Inc. cannot afford the cost of one Nuke, and the fact that a Cluster of Nukes is just silly talk (by a former employee of the Nuke Industry - whose article in today's IT is riddled with factual errors and inaccuracies), a distributed network of Biomass CHP plants has a lower capital cost, lower operating cost, does not rely on imported fuel, and has huge social and economic benefits for the Country as a whole.

Interconnecters provide us with an oppurtunity to overlap our energy production and boost renewables like wind and wave- selling electricity abroad when we have an excess, and purchasing electricity when production dips or demand spikes.

What part of "Distributed Biomass CHP is not intermittent." are you having difficulty with?

But this has its own problems- we will have to build more interconnecters to the European mainland; we are only finishing our first with Britain. And our energy supply will be vulnerable to the market fluctuations of other countries- something we have always ring-fenced electricity from. I suspect we are being sold free-market liberalism in the guise of green energy.

Ireland would be a nett exporter of Energy in such a scenario as we have the best wind resources in Europe, and our growing conditions for Biomass are even better again.

A consensus will have to be hammered out- otherwise we run the risk of either electricity blackouts or financial blackholes.

If the echo-chamber would kindly stop muddying the water by pretending a Nuke is either needed, or viable (never mind the "Cluster" of Nukes BS put forward today by someone who should know better), then we would have little difficulty achieving consensus.

But, for the record: The Greens have adopted a very credible Energy Policy. Fine Gael, The PDs and Sinn Fein now have policies that are practically indistinguishable from the Green's. A conversation with a very Senior FF bod yesterday would incline me to believe that they too have seen the light.

Nobody in authority - and that includes the Senior Civil Servants - are swallowing the Nuke Nonsense, because the numbers don't add up.

and here are the reasons why:

============================

[size=7]10 Reasons why a Nuke would be a dumb idea. [/size]

1) The cost of providing back up power for nuclear is prohibitive

Electricity Grid operators need to have back up power they can
immediately call on should a power station shut down
unexpectedly, as frequently happens. This back up power is called
'spinning reserve' and it has to be the same size as the biggest
power plant in the system. At the moment we have a total electricity
generating capacity in Ireland of 5,000 Mega Watts (MW). Efficient
nuclear power plants are at least 1,000 MW in size. If we were to
build such a plant in Ireland we would need three gas-fired plants
running on standby in case the nuclear plant has to be shut down.
Using the inter-connector to the UK does not solve the problem as
it would have to be on permanent standby rather than active use if
it were to provide the necessary cover. Even international experts
who advocate nuclear power recognise this problem and admit
that nuclear power would not be suitable for Ireland.


2) Renewable resources can provide the necessary power

The ESB International (ESBI) has estimated that our untapped
wind resources are equivalent to nineteen times the ESB's total
generation capacity. We should be using future interconnection to
export this wind power and become the green energy supplier for
the rest of Europe. At home we will be able to develop a multitude
of other renewable power supplies to provide clean efficient and
cheap power. Biomass crops are already proving to be economic
and we could lead the world in new technologies such as wave and
tidal power. Green Party analysis shows that we could have up to
50 per cent renewable supplies by 2020 and there is no reason
why we could not be 100 per cent renewable by the middle of this
century.


3)Nuclear power will not solve climate change

A doubling in global nuclear power by 2050 would only lead to a 5 per cent
reduction in global CO2 emissions. This is less than one tenth of the
reductions scientists say we require. Rather than being a magic bullet to
solve our climate change problems, nuclear power is a distraction from the
real issue. It allows people to think an easy solution is available which
avoids urgently needed changes in other areas. For Ireland the greatest
energy challenge will be in changing our transport and housing systems.
Improvements in this area will not be easy but it will bring social, economic
and environmental gains. The sooner we realise that nuclear is not the issue
and not the solution for Ireland, the sooner we can start tackling the real
energy agenda.


4) Energy efficiency provides a better economic and environmental return

Amory Lovins of the Rocky Mountain Institute (www.rmi.org) argues that
investment in end use efficiency programmes can deliver up to ten times the
gains in comparison to money spent on nuclear power. The Green Party is
already setting new energy efficient building standards within local authority
development plans which will cut in half the power use in our buildings and
save householders thousands of euro each year. Switching our car fleet to
fuel efficient engines would save as much energy as a nuclear power plant
would provide. Switching off our televisions and radios from standby could
save the equivalent power produced by two of our peat fired power stations.
All these measures save the Irish public hard cash with no loss of the
services energy provides


5) Nuclear will not heat our homes nor power our cars

Our energy use is divided equally between electricity generation, transport
and heating. As oil runs out we may have to power our cars by hydrogen or
by electric battery. Both these forms of stored energy are generated from
electricity but it makes more sense to use intermittent wind power rather
than nuclear to provide them. Already wood chip and pellets are cheaper
than oil or gas as a means of heating. By using smart new micro heat and
power systems we could have householders feeding power back to the grid
at the same time as they heat their homes. This micro-generation system will
provide a far more flexible and secure power supply than a
nuclear plant which can take a day to heat up to operating temperatures.


6) A centralised and subsidised state solution versus tens of thousands
of Green jobs

At the moment more energy is wasted in our centralised electricity
transmission and generation system than is used heating every house
and apartment in this country. These losses come from waste heat sent
up power station chimneys and in power used up in transmission
power lines. Nuclear power would only further enforce this wasteful
centralised system. The alternative Green vision is where thousands of
local generators provide power and heat for local homes and
businesses. This system is much more efficient, cleaner and cheaper
and will create tens of thousands of jobs throughout the country. The
nuclear option sends the two to three billion construction cost out of the
country to an overseas contractor.


7) The waste problem has never been solved

A major study by a team of professors at Massachusetts
Institute of Technology (http://web.mit.edu/nuclearpower/)
came to the conclusion that no one has yet resolved the challenge of
what to do with the long-term storage of nuclear waste. The United
States Government has designated a site in Yucca Mountain in Nevada
as an underground storage site but it has yet to be opened due to safety
concerns. Geologists need to know that the site will stay dry for tens of
thousands of years but such constant conditions are impossible
to predict given the way our climate is changing. It is one thing for a
country that already has a waste problem to decide to keep its plants
running or to commission new plants but it makes no sense for a country
without this waste problem to now take it on.

8 ) It is still not safe

Twenty years after Chernobyl, scientists still have no idea how to treat the
reactor, which is temporarily encased in a corroding concrete shell.
Meanwhile, an area the size of county Cork in Belarus is now permanently
uninhabitable because of the accident. Human error and management
lapses are the most common causes of accidents and they will,
unfortunately, always be with us. The reprocessing of nuclear fuels, as
occurs at Sellafield, presents particular hazards for public health. 83 per
cent of the collective EU radioactive dose from the nuclear industry comes
from such fuel processing discharges.


9) Uranium is also a depleting resource

To replace the energy the world currently gets from fossil fuels would
require us to build 10,000 of the largest nuclear power plants worldwide. We
do not have the capital to do that nor the uranium to power them for more
than a few years. Lower grade uranium resources require much more
energy output in the mining and processing of such fuels. Professor
Bertrand Bareé, scientific advisor to the French nuclear power company,
Areva, stated at a recent U.C.D. energy conference that we would start
running out of suitable uranium by the middle of this century. He suggested
we would then have to build 'fast breeder' reactors. The safety record of
these plutonium fuelled power plants is much more questionable.


10) Nuclear power leads to nuclear weapons

If we turn to nuclear power then we have to expect that other countries
would demand the right to the same power supplies. The fear is that
countries which can enrich uranium for nuclear power will then also process
such fuel for nuclear weapons. The greater the availability of nuclear power
the greater the chance also that terrorists could avail of materials to make
a crude nuclear device. Flying a plane into a nuclear plant would just as
easily turn it into a nuclear weapon.


Brought to you by your local friendly Green Party.

Read the Press Release

[Marx]

We also need to cut back our consumption just think all those TVs Computers, lights etc left on
Energy efficient light bulbs and appliances should be made cheaper
€6 for a energy efficient light bulb compared to cent for normal bulbs just doesn't make sense

[Sidewinder]

Well, the most efficient way of storing excess electricity at the moment is to pump water up a mountain. Then, when you need energy you let the water run back down the mountain through turbines.

This comes with obvious limitations. It is an expensive and sizeable operation and far more energy goes in than you ultimately get out of it. Also, the flow is limited to the duration that the water pours down- i.e. you need a lot of water.

I'm not making this up- this is actually the kind of operation you need to launch for a super-battery. Needless to say, it's not really feasible as the solution to our energy problems.

Yes, you can store sizeable quantities of electricity in capacitors, but you don't get as much of a flow as a burst of electricity. So, unless you want street lighting in Ireland to be strobe lighting, I wouldn't recommend that either.

If giant batteries did exist, we could harness a good deal of our energy from lightning. Best keep such thinking to the Frankenstein industry.

Come off it. That sounds like a load of smoke to me. Most windfarms are, and will continue to be, fairly small-scale operations. They'd hardly need their own hydro plant just to store a few hundred KW. And how can hydro be "the most efficient" while at the same time "far more energy goes in than you ultimately get out of it"

So you're telling me there is absolutely no way with current technology to store electricity and release it in a steady flow? G'way a that. Give me a small turbine and a couple of grand and I'll bet I could rig something up

"intermittent" smells to me like a giant red herring thrown out by the vested interests in our current power generation industry.

[interested_]

there's a aussie moveable wave power machine already built
and is being developed further in the states

i like the guy running up the hill with the pail of water though
i can see a work for the dole scheme in that ;'

http://www.energetech.com.au/

I think there is also one in scotland....

see:

Wavegen (Scotland): http://www.wavegen.co.uk/

Ocean Power Delivery (Scotland): http://www.oceanpd.com/

Archimedes Wave Swing (Netherlands): http://www.waveswing.com

Wave Power Group, University of Edinburgh (Scotland): http://www.mech.ed.ac.uk/research/wavepower/index.htm

Mighty Whale (Japan): http://www.jamstec.go.jp/jamstec/MTD/Whale/index.html

Energetech (Australia): http://www.energetech.com.au/

Interproject Service (IPS) Buoy (Sweden): http://members.tripod.com/Interproject/

[david]

SPN, you said:

A conversation with a very Senior FF bod yesterday would incline me to believe that they too have seen the light.

How does what you learnt tie in with the fact that the present incumbents in government have no wish to see small scale (community or domestic) electricity generation? And that the policy seems to be driven by EU pressure to 'open up' the electricity 'market' along with the slash and burn PDs influence?

My view is that, if ordinary joes were given financial help and technical support, we would (a) reduce our dependence on the grid, (b) kick-start whole new industries and services within Ireland (c) instil a 'green' ethos in otherwise complacent people and (d) stem the some of the sillier nuclear talk.

This doesn't tackle oil dependence for transport of course: but the green thinking which would ensue from people having been empowered (there's an appropriate word) may have a knock-on effect.

[damianob]

SPN, can you enlighten me: what is "Distributed Biomass CHP"
(I get the biomass bit).

Another reason not to go near nuclear is in this harrowing account about the clean up after Chernobyl