Britain's future power shortage could spill over on Ireland

[fiannafailure]

[quote=Civic_critic2;1983893]

By all means invest in wind, just be aware it's likely to have a 10 year lifetime after which it will be superceded. Also be aware that the market for exportable energy that you think hydro-storage will bring you is likely to be a fraction of what you're proposing, if there at all.

I really do not know where you are getting your information from, we will still be generating electricity from wind in 50 years time, when nuclear fusion is a reality.
The demand for electricity has expanded linearly since 1920 and this expansion will actually increase over the next 100 years. In the immediate future there will be a large export market as many countries will struggle to reach the EU renewable targets.

60%-70% of all the electricity generated gets lost in transmission, we only actually consume 1/3rd of the electricity produced. Of that 1/3rd, 20% is used for lighting alone. That can be cut by a fifth simply by using CFL lightbulbs and OLED will cut that in half again and produce much better light. Local electricity production will reduce power loss via transmission as well as place lower demand overall on the system.

Again I am lost for words re your statistics, if we only consumed one third of all electricity produced we would be paying a euro per unit rather 15c. The actual losses from transmission are in the order of 5%. I agree that LEDs will reduce our lighting load and in fact will allow a lighting revolution. As regards local electricity production, it is a good idea, in moderation, let me introduce you to another grid engineering term, grid inertia, it describes the ability of the grid to withstand sudden demand for power.

Baldo in his lecture talks about grid synchronisation as an issue that will arise when solar production reaches between 5% - 15% of overall total production. He mentions it as a practicality he is aware of having worked in a power plant. He addresses it as an engineering issue that will have to be dealt with, not as an insuperable problem. It is mentioned again and again by solar engineers who speak of the need for a 'smart grid'.

Why reinvent the wheel, there are many ways of frequency control available, it is not an insurmountable problem, but a very real issue if you want your brand new led tv to last longer than a week.

I'm just telling you what will happen over the next 20 years. Government in Ireland should be investing in solar R&D today specific to the issues that will arise in its use in our country. Failure to do so and to go running off on white elephant 20th century engineering projects would be foolish. That is not to say hydro-storage will not be viable, it just must be costed and set beside the other storage, transmission and electrical generation methods that are almost reaching full development and commercial viability.

I have one link for you to study

Electricity Storage Association - power quality, power supply

[Civic_critic2]

What I put down as transmission losses is actually energy losses due to coal fired generation and transmission losses. Apart from that you strike me as a waffler. For one thing you're simply not taking on board what is happening in nanotechnology. Secondly I've given you figures, now show me yours for wind generation and hydro-storage. If they add up now and into the future I'll happily say so.

[fiannafailure]

What I put down as transmission losses is actually energy losses due to coal fired generation and transmission losses. Apart from that you strike me as a waffler. For one thing you're simply not taking on board what is happening in nanotechnology. Secondly I've given you figures, now show me yours for wind generation and hydro-storage. If they add up now and into the future I'll happily say so.

So you are saying that for example, Moneypoint only extracts 30% of the energy from every ton of coal and the other 70% goes up the chimney, and then the transmission loss is 5%. OK I can agree with that.

Wind turbines on the other hand, extract close to the theoretical maximum from every cubic metre of air moving through the arc of the blades, not in the future, now, every day of the week. This theoretical maximum is about 60%.

Solar, extracts 10 to 15% of the energy falling on the panel, some of the new PV panels get 20%, but are very expensive. I have no doubt that this efficiency will increase but it will take time. In the oil crisis of the 1970's a lot of work was begun on solar tech but was dropped when OPEC came to their senses, the solar industry lost almost 40 years of development and is now actually bringing some of the old warriors out of retirement to help the effort.

I gave you a link to the world authority on electricity storage

Electricity Storage Association - power quality, power supply

You will find there an analysis of all forms of storage on cost, efficiency, life cycle cost in fact every criteria you need to make a decision, and pumped hydro scores very well on all criteria, but only if you have the sites, and Ireland has very cost effective sites, at less than €800 million for a hundred thousand MW hours, that is a lot of storage.

I am very well aware of nano tech, in fact it is very exciting, however it will, I believe take much the same development curve as integrated circuits and it took IC's over 45 years to get to their present state of development, where they are everywhere. Sony first used transistors in the 1950s, 25 years after they were first developed and first used chips 10 years after they first offered to industry. Commercialising a new techniology takes time.

As regards the waffle statement, I will add it to the roll of honour alongside snake oil salesman and spammer, as I carry on knocking on doors and talking to the people of the localities where Spirit of Ireland would like to put our sites, you are welcome to come along and present your vision, however these people would like action now, not in 25 years time. Oh and I hope you have a good capacity for drinking tea, as people are quite hospitable.

[Civic_critic2]

Solar, extracts 10 to 15% of the energy falling on the panel, some of the new PV panels get 20%, but are very expensive.

No they're not, I've told you the costs. To reiterate on just one area: silicon prices have declined from $450/kg to $100/kg in just 1 year, they are now a quarter of what they were in 2008. Low cost thin-film technologies have already been developed many of which use less silicon than before and some of which utilise just 5 microns of silicon instead of the hitherto 200 microns, 40 times less silicon. On top of that non-imaging optics has been brought to bear to create cheap plastic and dye composite concentrators which have achieved 20% efficiency in the lab. These concentrators, concentrating light at the sides of a plastic sheet rather than across its full face area, require up to 100 times less silicon to be covered to achieve the same job.
The 2 greatest economic problems with solar are cost of silicon and cost of installation. On the cost of silicon side, the three savings outlined above when applied to the same panel equal 1/4 x 1/40 x 1/100 = one sixteen-thousandth of what was previously required, or 1/16000. The cost of silicon will no longer be an issue as these advances are commercialised.
On the installtion side, which costs two-thirds of the price of a solar system, the way that will be overcome on a large scale is through creating sheets that can be self-installed. Flexible sheets of printed solar cells are already being made. With widespread adoption expertise will also become widely available just as mechanics are widespread and installation will become cheaper and far faster.

I am very well aware of nano tech, in fact it is very exciting, however it will, I believe take much the same development curve as integrated circuits and it took IC's over 45 years to get to their present state of development, where they are everywhere. Sony first used transistors in the 1950s, 25 years after they were first developed and first used chips 10 years after they first offered to industry. Commercialising a new techniology takes time.

Nanotechnology is not a focused technology like integrated circuits, it is what is called an 'enabling technology', it can be applied to everything. To compare the development of transistors from the 1950s into the chips we have today to current developments in nanotechnology betrays a profound ignorance of what is going on in my view. Comparing the utilisation of todays computing power, instantaneous data-sharing, multi-disciplinary international teamworking and scientific tools that mankind could only have previously dreamed of to the science of the middle to latter half of the 20th century is utterly half-baked. Commercialisation also doesn't take very much time: Covalent, the spin-off company from Baldo's Luminescent Solar Concentrator, is seeking to bring the product to market over the next 2-3 years. The high performance lithium ion battery used in Black & Decker tools took 18 months from demonstration in the lab to being available on shop shelves.

You will find there an analysis of all forms of storage on cost, efficiency, life cycle cost in fact every criteria you need to make a decision, and pumped hydro scores very well on all criteria, but only if you have the sites, and Ireland has very cost effective sites, at less than €800 million for a hundred thousand MW hours, that is a lot of storage.

You see, this is what I mean by waffler. I ask you for numbers and you give me a very general website containing a few generalised numbers - hydro is 70%-85% efficient, 1-2GW capcity costs in the region of 1-2 billion dollars and so forth and some generalised waffle about the efficiency of wind turbines.. I asked you for the numbers about Ireland. How big do these hydro stations need to be, how deep, how high, how many, how much water, what pipe speed and pressure, how much, how economic will they be compared to 10 years down the road, what advances are in the pipeworks to make them better, what is the size of your proposed export market in dollar and euro terms, how do you arrive at those figures, what will be the complexion of that market in 10 years as other countries make a big shift to renewables themselves, how many wind turbines at how much cost and land area, etc. It shouldn't be too difficult to fit the guts of these into a few paragraphs.

[fiannafailure]

[quote=Civic_critic2;1986346]

No they're not, I've told you the costs. To reiterate on just one area: silicon prices have declined from $450/kg to $100/kg in just 1 year, they are now a quarter of what they were in 2008. Low cost thin-film technologies have already been developed many of which use less silicon than before and some of which utilise just 5 microns of silicon instead of the hitherto 200 microns, 40 times less silicon. On top of that non-imaging optics has been brought to bear to create cheap plastic and dye composite concentrators which have achieved 20% efficiency in the lab. These concentrators, concentrating light at the sides of a plastic sheet rather than across its full face area, require up to 100 times less silicon to be covered to achieve the same job.
The 2 greatest economic problems with solar are cost of silicon and cost of installation. On the cost of silicon side, the three savings outlined above when applied to the same panel equal 1/4 x 1/40 x 1/100 = one sixteen-thousandth of what was previously required, or 1/16000. The cost of silicon will no longer be an issue as these advances are commercialised.
On the installtion side, which costs two-thirds of the price of a solar system, the way that will be overcome on a large scale is through creating sheets that can be self-installed. Flexible sheets of solar cells are already being made. With widespread adoption expertise will also become widely available just as mechanics are widespread and installation will become cheaper and far faster.

When you can quote me an installation price per MW including site cost, let me know

Nanotechnology is not a focused technology like integrated circuits, it is what is called an 'enabling technology', it can be applied to everything. To compare the development of transistors in the 1950s into the chips we have today to current developments in nanotechnology betrays a profound ignorance of what is going on in my view. Comparing the utilisation of todays computing power, instantaneous data-sharing, multi-disciplinary international teamworking and scientific tools that mankind could only have previously dreamed of to the science of the middle to latter half of the 20th century is utterly half-baked. Commercialisation also doesn't take very much time: Covalent, the spin-off company from Baldo's Luminescent Solar Concentrator, is seeking to bring the product to market over the next 2-3 years. The high performance lithium ion battery used in Black & Decker tools took 18 months from demonstration in the lab to being available on shop shelves.

And when you can convince someone like Intel or Kerry Foods to power their factories on solar energy, I will buy you a pint.

You see, this is what I mean by waffler. I ask you for numbers and you give me a very general website containing a few generalised numbers - hydro is 70%-85% efficient, 1-2GW capcity costs in the region of 1-2 billion dollars and so forth and some generalised waffle about the efficiency of wind turbines.. I asked you for the numbers about Ireland. How big do these hydro stations need to be, how deep, how high, how many, how much water, what pipe speed and pressure, how much, how economic will they be compared to 10 years down the road, what advances are in the pipeworks to make them better, what is the size of your proposed export market in dollar and euro terms, how do you arrive at those figures, what will be the complexion of that market in 10 years as other countries make a big shift to renewables themselves, how many wind turbines at how much cost and land area, etc. It shouldn't be too difficult to fit the guts of these into a few paragraphs.

It will cost €800 million to build a seawater pumped hydro unit to store 100GW/hrs, this will have ten 100MW turbines, the turbines have been costed by Siemens, Toshiba and RainPower, the civil engineering by SIAC and Sisk. It will take an area of 2km by 2km and 80m deep to store that amount of energy

S of I wish to install around 2500 new turbines, owned by local co ops, we have identified good sites and are currently going door to door to get local agreement and have not met much, if any opposition. The area of the country we are working in at present is about 13 miles by ten and could house about half the requirement of turbines and 99% of the population would have to make a real effort to be impacted by them.

Ireland has the biggest wind resources per capita in Europe and one of the highest in the world, every day €60 billion euro of energy, costed at the wholesale rate of electricity blows through our hair. We aim to harvest a small proportion of this. And we propose to use off the shelf technology to do this. A wind turbine costs about €1.9 million per MW to install and we wish to use utility level financing, simplification of the planning laws, bulk purchasing and local manufacture to bring this down to about €1.3 million per MW. A wind turbine will last around 20 years and will have paid for itself after 7 years.

The lifetime of the hydro storage units is measured in centuries, and its use is not confined to wind energy, if your solar tech is available in 10 years, you are welcome to use pumped hydro to make it suitable for grid utilisation and solve your intermittancy issues and nanotech will not save you from that problem

As regards the export market, we are currently working in a thread devoted to the problems of electrical supply in Britain and as this link shows the population density of Britain is making it difficult to meet their renewable targets

BBC NEWS | Science & Environment | Green energy hit by 'faceless Nimbys'

Spain, Portugal and Denmark have made real strides in the renewable energy industry and most of the rest of europe are struggling.
I cannot give you a figure for exports at the moment as we are currently talking to the government about using the hydro units to cut the peak off the demand curve and enable much lower electricity prices to achieved, giving this country a competitive advantage. If we were to export, the revenue would be in the Billions.

[fiannafailure]

Oh and I almost forgot to mention, we envisage about 50,000 jobs being created almost immediately, with all the good things that will mean for our economy

[wombat]

S of I wish to install around 2500 new turbines, .... The area of the country we are working in at present is about 13 miles by ten and could house about half the requirement of turbines .

How sure are you that this will be possible from a layout perspective - just the technical aspect, planning is another question.

[Civic_critic2]

And when you can convince someone like Intel or Kerry Foods to power their factories on solar energy, I will buy you a pint.

Spoken like a true farmer (or auctioneer/solicitor/estate agent/place representative occupation of member of establishment here). Kind of reminds me of when James Burke tried to explain his theory of metaphysics to the Late Late Show audience.

Pumped hydro might be useful, I'd like to see figures for how much it will be used on a day to day basis, how mcuh power will be drawn from it and how much of our own energy requirements it will provide, i.e. how many of these hydro-storage plants would be needed to run a largely renewawably-powered ireland and how much would be needed to create an export market on top of that. 2km by 2 km I can live with, I can even live with a couple of those.

But on the windmills, well that's another story. You say that you're proposing to put 1250 windmills in an area of 130 square miles - that's an average of 10 windmills per square mile but you say the local population "would have to make a real effort to be impacted by them". I find that an unlikely assertion, to say the least. You also suggest that nanotech will not save us from the storage issue - an assertion full of the same ignorance about nanotechnology as some of your previous assertions. It is nanotechnology above all which is likely to be at the forefront of solving the storage issue.

You also say that it takes 7 years for these wind turbines to pay themselves back,. So after spending 3.3 billion euros implementing this plan over the next 5 - 10 years they should have paid themselves back just in time to watch the rest of the world deploy very flexible solar technologies very cheaply. And you end with a clarion call to think of the 50,000 jobs that would be created immediately (and perhaps all the land that would be zoned from agricultural to industrial use) - it sounds like a PR piece from the Construction Industry Federation.

But I know I know, you don't want to hear such facts as the amount of insolation available every day in Ireland, the efficiencies and economics that would enable that power to be drawn off, the technologies that are now available to do so and all that stuff - if you can't see it on top of the roof of Kerry Co-op you don't want to hear any of it...

[fiannafailure]

How sure are you that this will be possible from a layout perspective - just the technical aspect, planning is another question.

Wombat it is a challenge, but doable, as you say the planning choice is concentrated wind farms in two or three areas, with local support or widespread small scale. Economically and technically the concentrated option is best.

Dont forget there are over 600 acres in a sguare mile so the density is one turbine every 60 acres or so, the real problem is minimising turbelence and the amount of roads etc.

[fiannafailure]

[quote=Civic_critic2;1989111]

Spoken like a true farmer (or auctioneer/solicitor/estate agent/place representative occupation of member of establishment here). Kind of reminds me of when James Burke tried to explain his theory of metaphysics to the Late Late Show audience.

If you knew me, you would definately not call me a member of the establishment, but I am a practical person and Spirit of Ireland are all practical people. When you propose to spend other peoples money, you must keep your feet on the ground, as I said, show me a practical project and it might have merit, but projections of technical developments are not investable, although individual patents may be.

Pumped hydro might be useful, I'd like to see figures for how much it will be used on a day to day basis, how mcuh power will be drawn from it and how much of our own energy requirements it will provide, i.e. how many of these hydro-storage plants would be needed to run a largely renewawably-powered ireland and how much would be needed to create an export market on top of that. 2km by 2 km I can live with, I can even live with a couple of those.

The max output of each unit will be 1 Gw, Irelands winter demand is about 5.5 GW

But on the windmills, well that's another story. You say that you're proposing to put 1250 windmills in an area of 130 square miles - that's an average of 10 windmills per square mile but you say the local population "would have to make a real effort to be impacted by them". I find that an unlikely assertion, to say the least. You also suggest that nanotech will not save us from the storage issue - an assertion full of the same ignorance about nanotechnology as some of your previous assertions. It is nanotechnology above all which is likely to be at the forefront of solving the storage issue.

I said that 99% of the population of Ireland would have to make a real effort to be impacted, I said that nanotech will not save you from the intermittent nature of solar. I believe that carbon nanotubes and buckyballs can do wonderful things, but they cannot cheat the laws of physics, particularly the laws of thermodynamics.

You also say that it takes 7 years for these wind turbines to pay themselves back,. So after spending 3.3 billion euros implementing this plan over the next 5 - 10 years they should have paid themselves back just in time to watch the rest of the world deploy very flexible solar technologies very cheaply. And you end with a clarion call to think of the 50,000 jobs that would be created immediately (and perhaps all the land that would be zoned from agricultural to industrial use) - it sounds like a PR piece from the Construction Industry Federation.

Whenever you make an investment, buy a tv or car, you know that there will be a new model in a few months. However if you continually wait for the new model to come out, you never buy anything. And your tv does not stop working just because there is a newer version available. when it stops working you can choose to repair it or replace it.
Placing wind turbines in a field does not require an industrial zoning, in fact in most cases the agricultural activities continue unaffected

But I know I know, you don't want to hear such facts as the amount of insolation available every day in Ireland, the efficiencies and economics that would enable that power to be drawn off, the technologies that are now available to do so and all that stuff - if you can't see it on top of the roof of Kerry Co-op you don't want to hear any of it...

I am actually very interested, but let me see a practical implementation, you mentioned previously placing PV panels on railbeds, how will they stay clean, place a piece of glass or plastic on the ground and come back in a week, it will not be clean.

There is another problem you gloss over, all semiconductor junctions degrade over time, currently the life of a PV panel is about 20 years maximum, will nano help there.
And the life of an LED bulb will be quoted at 15 years, however at 14 years it will only be 60% as bright as on day one, but a useful life of 10 years is still good, particularly as it will have only used 10% of the energy a thermal bulb will have used.
The point I am making is that new techs need time to mature and more importantly for the world to start to trust them and making extravagant claims do not help the process. That is the viewpoint I was advancing when I mentioned Intel and Kerry Foods