Spiritofireland.org - suggests energy independence in five years and much more

[sparkey321]

if I bump into Igor I will pass on your question, and I will ask him how he and all his accountant, engineering and scientific friends managed to miss the points you bring to the table.

Please do. I am looking forward to his response.

[fiannafailure]

Maybe because there were no economists to, like, advise on the economics of this hair brained scheme.

You know at first I thought it was your standard industry rent-seeking initiative. Looking to have the government impose by regulation or via spending tax payers' money for them.

Now I think there might be more vanity involved here. Don't be mistaken, there are rent seekers buzzing all around this no because they sense an opportunity to fleece people (just look at the lists of vested interests already involved, or giving "advice" etc.), but there are people behind this who are doing it for personal glory or satisfaction.

Genuine offer, would you like to review all the data/studies and add your expertise, just say the word. Sparkey too. But all the rent seekers and vanitists are spending their own money and time to research and develop this, not a consultancy or retainer in sight.

[realist]

Realist
Before you inflate the property prices in co Clare, there are members of the team from every part of the country.

Surely you mean 'deflate'? Property devaluation is one of the reasons many wind farm applications have been refused by local county councils. Also, according to SOI member P Howard:
"Mr Howard, who is a member of the newly launched Spirit of Ireland Initiative, said that Clare is the only county on the Western seaboard of Ireland with the existing electricity grid capacity to accommodate the additional renewable energy power."

I live in a city too, but I know also that the wild, unindustrialised rural landscape is not a very easy place to make a living, and in many cases rural people living in this landscape didn't even get a smell of the tigers scent.

No, it never has been an easy place to make a living. However, according to the SOI website, hydro power technology advancements will make the windfarms redundant in 20/30 years therefore offering no income protection for future generations.

Have you asked the people of Clare or Mayo or Donegal what they think, Spirit of Ireland are.

A quick search of the web will show you the many, many action groups set up in opposition to Clare, Mayo and Donegal wind farm applications.

A pumped hydro plant as proposed is not a typical industrial imposition on the landscape, it looks like a lake.

I wasn't talking about the 'lake', I was talking about the industrial wind turbines.

But that lake will employ local people directly, 365 days a year and will enhance the tourist industry not destroy it, again giving local people more opportunity to provide jobs for themselves, and their children long into the future

See answer 2 above.

West Clare renewable energy by the way is a Co-op of local people not a multinational imposing itself on the landscape.

As you state above, the celtic tiger bypassed the rural community. The projected cost for this proposal is €200 million. If there are 30 families involved, they would have to raise at least €6 million each to fund it. I know I wouldn't be able to raise that kind of money.

Holland is known worldwide for its windmills, I wonder what the contempory nimbys were thinking when they were being built. Dont forget beauty is in the eye of the beholder. I will gladly take the money of the tourist looking for the gombeen Ireland, but would much prefer to take the money off the tourist who is interested in a forward looking, resourseful economy.

Do you choose your holiday destination because of its forward looking, resourceful economy? If so, I'd say you are in a small minority. Tourists come to Ireland for the scenery - just look at any of the tourist brochures.

As regards your link, I am more interested in the part that Ireland plays in that average, the wind and wave energy available to this country far exceeds most other countries. Just as the fossil resources of other countries far exceeds our own.

Denmark has the highest concentration of windmills in Europe. According to the following link from the Danish Ministry of Food, Agriculture and Fisheries, wind power only accounts for 2.5% of energy consumption.
Denmark to focus on biomass to reduce CO2 emissions - Ministeriet for Fødevarer, Landbrug og Fiskeri

I do not understand why the Irish rural farming community are not investigating biomass technology over wind power. It would be cheaper to set up, more sustainable, reliable and a more environmentally friendly form of energy generation. Also, as far as I know, payments to producers are higher for biomass than wind.

[fiannafailure]

realist
Thank you for your views on this subject, and I hope we have many more conversations, what I will say at this point because time is against right now.

Biomass will have a place in Irelands energy future particularly when we have the pumped storage units running, I say this for one reason only, as any operator of any type of generation soon learns, connecting to the grid and making full use of your investment is very difficult, for reasons I will get into later, none are deliberate impediments, but they are there.

I agree the present windfarms are usually owned by small co-ops with high entry costs, S of I will change that substantially. Windfarms may not be the main form of renewable generation as the years go by, possibly being superseded by tidal and wave, but these methods are not at a commercial stage and will not progress very fast unless there is a quaranteed market for their output, again we are back to grid engineering. One thing I will say is that the pumped hydro units proposed by S of I will still be generating in100 years although the method of charging them may change over time.

S of I are presently talking to industry stakeholders to get their views on how S of I will integrate their technology with existing infrastructure, we can then start talking specifics, this will be concluded over the next 6-8 weeks and at that stage S of I will begin to work in the local communities in the western counties all seven or nine of them, explain the plan, get their reaction and if the majority of the locals of a particular area tell us to get lost, we go simple as that. however as of today you would need more than one hand to count the expressions of interest from local areas.

Finally S of I propose that a percentage of all revenue generated by their facilities in any particular area, will stay and be used in those areas, for whatever uses the the locals put them to, this is an area being studied at the moment also, how best to do this, should it go to local government or a trust or anyone got any ideas. And those hydro units will be producing revenue for a long time. But the important point is that this will not be imposed on anyone, but we think we can make a good case for acceptance. And why wait for the end of the summer to tell S of I your concerns, there is a forum on the website where you will see people doing that now. Spirit of Ireland - National Project for Energy Independence

[fiannafailure]

An asset is written off over a fixed term. This varies across different asset types. (physical Infrastructure V's a PC for example.)

However what you have failed to see (or acknowledge) is that according to SOI the hypothetical reservoir above would only cost 800 million with the wind turbines making up the rest. Wind turbines have a much much shorter life span and as age increases so do maintenance costs.

So the vast majority of the depreciation figure given was for the depreciation of the wind-farms. You will also notice that I made no allowance for a profit from the wind-farms.

I also did not allow for maintenance, insurance, administration, etc which would make up a significant portion of the overall costs. I am just pulling figures out of the air but I would guess that over the life of a wind farm approx 50% of the overhead would be non capital ?

I also have not included the running costs, maintenance etc of the reservoir to the equation.

You also have to factor in a return on investment for all this private capital you plan on raising and interest payments on the debt that will no doubt raise.

Even depreciating your reservoir over 100 years and depreciating the wind farms over 25 years the true cost of the power generated by this scheme will be multiples of the figure I quoted above.

So why don't you run along to Igor, have him look at the figures and come back to us with his explanation.

There is also money in the budgets for proposed grid infrastructure additions, and at present the absolute cost of investment for a wind turbine in a good location is 12 years output, all in, we think we can improve that.

[maxthedog]

The website is a joke. It looks nice, has plenty of fluff but no substance.

What volume of water storage would be required to power peak demand of this country for say 12 hours (an absolute minimum requirement) ? Anyone ?

Lets put it this way Ardnacrusha uses 400 cubic meters of water a second or 24,000 cubic meters a minute or 1,440,000 an hour or 17,280,000 cubic meters in 12 hours.

Ardnacrusha generates approx 86 MW

Moneypoint generates 915MW. So used ardnacrusha as a model you would need the equivalent of 10.64 ardnacrushas (for the sake of calculations lets use 10.)

So now we need 170,280,000 meters cubed of water just to replace moneypoint.

That's a reservoir 557 meters wide by 557 meters long by 557 meters high and that's just to replace moneypoint.

The ESB total fossil fuel generating capacity is over 3 times that.

Now imagine the amount of power required to not only replace all these fossil fuel generating plants but also to refill these reservoirs.

Until I see some real figures its a pipe dream, its vapour ware.

Looking back over the thread i found this referance to the reservoir.

It has been put forward that S,O.I. will build a scenic reservoir that will also fit in with the surrounding countryside.

A reservoir made up of sea-water. The most alive product on the planet, with the added power of salt. When this starts to stagnate the stench will make a landfill site look like Disneyland. Remember "the time in the slime" and that was only an old digital clock in fresh-water. Add in sea-water and you have soup, or worse still acid.

Not one penny of public money should be given too this group. Its a free country and what they want to do with their own dosh is up to them. But not a penny of my kids birth right. The banks have already raided the pension fund, its imperitive that all other raiders are repelled.

[fiannafailure]

Looking back over the thread i found this referance to the reservoir.

It has been put forward that S,O.I. will build a scenic reservoir that will also fit in with the surrounding countryside.

A reservoir made up of sea-water. The most alive product on the planet, with the added power of salt. When this starts to stagnate the stench will make a landfill site look like Disneyland. Remember "the time in the slime" and that was only an old digital clock in fresh-water. Add in sea-water and you have soup, or worse still acid.

Not one penny of public money should be given too this group. Its a free country and what they want to do with their own dosh is up to them. But not a penny of my kids birth right. The banks have already raided the pension fund, its imperitive that all other raiders are repelled.

maxthedog
S of I were made aware of this potential problem early in the research and even have someone looking into possible ways to harvest more energy from the biology of seawater, and be assured S of I intend this to be privately funded project if for no other reason than to avoid EU public tender rules and keep the jobs at home, but we do propose to give your children a free share, and if the reservoir ever has a chance to stagnate S of I will be out of business very guickly.

[sparkey321]

I will be honest here and admit that the costs I calculated above are a bit unrealistic.

I did however base them on SOI figures (which seem to have been ignored) and on that basis I stand over them.

I have a second set of figures that make little more sense (and could possibly justify the reservoir investment) but before I post them I would like finnafailure (and by insinuation) SOI to confirm a number of points and answer some questions.

SOI plan to have no financial investment in the actual windfalls and to just be a customer to them. They will actual buy the wind generated power at market price to fill their reservoir and then sell the power generated by their hydro turbines ?

Is the reservoir being designed to ensure that wind will provide secure consistent power or is it being designed only to supply power at times of peak demand ?

In other words is it being designed to act as a backup to the wind farms and only provide power when the wind fails or wind generation falls below a set level ?

If it is the latter then any reservoir will have to have the capacity to maintain consistency of power for extended periods (weeks ideally a month). Is the reservoir being designed with that in mind or could SOI please state the how long a period do they think they need to maintain capacity for to ensure security of supply ?

Seeing as we now know (thanks to Fianna Failure) the GWH capacity of the reservoirs then once known the storage period the reservoir is being designed for it is easy to calculate the designed power output of the turbine.

[fiannafailure]

Sparkey321,
I too will admit that S of I perhaps fail to adequately explain the totality of the proposal being offered and to your credit you have pointed out to S of I that more work needs to be put in here, before they engage with the public one to one, it is very evident even as I look back over my debate with you that S of I have fallen into the usual hole engineering heads fall into when explaining their concepts.

I will answer your question in this way, the really fundamental problem the proposal seeks to address, is the the cost to market and the creation of a more efficient sustainable market for renewable generation of any type, wind biomass, tidal, wave etc. So from here on when I mention the word wind, you may also read tidal, wave or biomass.

When the pumped storage reservoirs are built, S of I would like to have two initially, they will then compete with eirgrid to connect existing or proposed wind farmers without an eirgrid connection and also seek to build wind farms local to the reservoirs if possible. Remember to think about more than wind.
There is the possibility that security of market will lower the wholesale price of wind, this is a matter for the farmers accountants to consider, but works in this regard in the wider economy.

The Pumped storage units are designed to enable renewable energy to participate in both the the base load or spinning reserve roles and where possible export any excess capacity via the inter connection to foreign grids. and the probable reservoir sizes are in the range, 2 km x 2km x 50-100m depth, but depending on the sites made available by local communities may be bigger, the energy density of this size site is about 100GWhr and this will also contribute to security of supply, but in this regard security of supply can be expanded by the provision of more capacity.

In the short term wind is the commercially available technology to feed the storage reservoirs but as other methods of farming energy become available, they will be able to plug into the market and infrastructure being proposed, once the country has a few years experience of the reliability and cost benefits of the above project, we will be in a better place to consider a world of high oil prices. this also states S of I attitude to fossil generation.

And speaking of oil, it might interest the financial people that the national pension reserve fund peers in the gulf oil state's are actively seeking sound investments in renewable energy projects globally to enable their continued prosperity, before oil supplies start to dwindle noticeably.

I hope that when the S of I launch is viewed through the perspective of this post, we might be a bit closer to a meeting of minds and I confidently predict that when you look at your figures through the above perspective they have a bit more colour in their cheeks. But even if I havent made them look better I have answered the questions you asked and look forward to seeing the result

[Vega1447]

FiannaFailure: I have spoken to alternative energy researchers in one Irish University re SoI.

They were very measured and polite.

But dismissive.

Sadly, SoI is a ball of smoke.

Free Range Steorn....