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

[Calina]

Then get yourself a motto that does not come across as an economic threat to a small rural community.

[fiannafailure]

Calina
There are many economic threats to small rural communities and I think the people who live in these communities are intelligent enough to see that an off the cuff remark or a motto are no threat to them. There may be an element of east coast superiority to your comments all through this debate, you certainly brook no light heartedness.

Please enlighten us to your own opinion on energy supply in this country.

[Hal]

Calina
There are many economic threats to small rural communities and I think the people who live in these communities are intelligent enough to see that an off the cuff remark or a motto are no threat to them. There may be an element of east coast superiority to your comments all through this debate, you certainly brook no light heartedness.

Please enlighten us to your own opinion on energy supply in this country.

This idea seems to me to at least hold the strong possibility of success and if so can only be good for local communities and for Ireland.

Have you any idea what is behind the extreamly vitriolic opposition to this project?

[fiannafailure]

Hal
That is why I asked Calina for her views on Irelands energy policy, perhaps she believes that there is no problem and everything is fine as it is.

[fiannafailure]

Wombat

As an engineer you may be interested in this link

New Record: World’s Largest Wind Turbine (7+ Megawatts) »» MetaEfficient Reviews

Enercon are the company that Padraig Howard and Shannon Development are talking to about locating a factory in Ireland, to supply the Irish and British markets.

[wombat]

Interesting note - "The turbine being installed in Emden, Germany by Enercon. They will be testing several types of storage systems in combination with the multi-megawatt wind turbines."

[fiannafailure]

Wombat

Storage is the key to making any renewable source of energy reliable.

I am not sure if I ever recounted the story told to me by an ESB engineer, at the S of I presentation to Engineers Ireland. Our only current pumped storage unit at Turlough Hill was, as you know built to accomadate the then proposed nuclear station at Carnsore point. The nuclear station did not of course get built, but at the opening ceremony of Turlough Hill, there was a lot of muttering about white elephants etc and the staff of the grid control room were of the opinion that it might be used once or twice a year. Within six months Turlough Hill became the firm favourite of those same staff for its sheer practicality and dependability, it had allowed a much better maintainance regime be applied to all of the other generation on the grid and had saved a lot of money and made the grid a lot easier to control.

And of course the other major benefit of large scale pumped storage is that it actually increases the financial value of any energy parked in it. Electricity produced at 2 am is worth a lot less to the producer than electricity supplied at peak demand, and particularly if you intend to export that energy.
There was one striking figure I came across recently in Britain where on this particular day, electricity was bought at 4 pence a unit at 5 am but was at 6 pm on that same day being bought for £6 pounds a unit. The reason for this was that one of the large nuclear stations had tripped off the grid, most of the swings are not that big but there is a huge differnce in prices throughout the day.

Eirgrid actually classify Turlough Hill as a network resource rather than a generator.

[Calina]

Calina
There are many economic threats to small rural communities and I think the people who live in these communities are intelligent enough to see that an off the cuff remark or a motto are no threat to them. There may be an element of east coast superiority to your comments all through this debate, you certainly brook no light heartedness.

Please enlighten us to your own opinion on energy supply in this country.

Before I do so, if you go to any community and say "If you don't accept us and our money spinning idea, your neighbours will", that is an economic threat whether you like it or not, particularly in areas already suffering from rural depopulation and braindrain.

With respect to energy supply in this country, we need to look at how we plan to use energy in the future first. Spirit of Ireland hasn't really looked at this in so much detail prior to their insane stupid PR launch a few months ago until people started reminding them that certain energy requirements meant that their clarion call that they could make the country energy independent was unlikely to hit fruition.

We currently have a mix of renewables and fossil fuel generation systems in place. We have one storage facility I believe, and renewables are mainly from hydro and to a far lesser extent, wind. Ultimately in the long term, we will have to look for alternatives. The main choices appear to be wind, tidal and nuclear.

It's been pointed out that nuclear is politically difficult. Wind only works with storage and tidal is currently still in a preliminary phase. Nuclear will probably also require storage facilities if the set up in France is anything to go by.

In principle, I don't have any objections to wind power being harnessed to generate electricity although I have severe reservations about current practice in building some of those windfarms in the middle of our carbon sinks. Given a choice between maintaining the carbon sinks and importing electricity, I would prefer to import electricity.

I have never voiced any opposition to using renewable energies. You do yourself a disservice to assume opposition to Spirit of Ireland's currently less than competent looking project planning also equates to an opposition to renewable energies.

I am not against renewables. I am against Spirit of Ireland's project for the simple reason that they don't appear to be competent to implement a project of this nature at this point in time.

If you can't understand the difference, nothing I say will make it any easier for you.

@Hal

currently I am devoid of faith that Spirit of Ireland can make this happen in the way they depicted in their initial PR. Given that they will not be able to provide energy independence in 5 years and will not be able to decommission the fossil fuel plants in that time either and will need to import via the interconnector when a) the wind doesn't blow and b) the storage runs out, key selling points of their PR are redundant at this stage. Sustainable Energy Ireland, incidently, has not been overwhelming in their belief that Spirit of Ireland can deliver either.

In my view, Spirit of Ireland's approach runs the risk of damaging the possibilities offered by renewables given their hamfisted efforts to date. I gave up on their own forum because they frankly didn't have answers to any questions that are standard for a project which they had already costed. A key one related to the number of wind turbines - the last estimate which may have changed was 2500-3000. There's a big difference between those two figures. Likewise for the storage. Igor S on their forum, in direct response to "how many pumped storage systems do you need to build" came back with an answer between 2 and 4. As each of them were costed at around a billion euro at the time, that difference again represents a major costing difference.

Spirit of Ireland have not gone about this in any professional or competent manner at all. Questions regarding flooding western valleys have not had what I would consider useful responses.

As such I don't support this project although elements of the concept are okay with me as outlined above.

[wombat]

I am not against renewables. I am against Spirit of Ireland's project for the simple reason that they don't appear to be competent to implement a project of this nature at this point in time.

Until they present their proposal, we cannot assess their competance. I am willing to wait until next month when they have promised to present a concrete proposal. As fiannafailure has pointed out many times, the key to renewables is a method of storing surplus energy for use at times of peak demand. We know that Turlough Hill works, we don't know what the specific SoI proposals are. The biggest danger to the further development of renewables, specifically windpower is the current policy of one off windmills.

[fiannafailure]

Thank you Calina for your forthright and comprehensive reply


[quote=Calina;1992573]

Before I do so, if you go to any community and say "If you don't accept us and our money spinning idea, your neighbours will", that is an economic threat whether you like it or not, particularly in areas already suffering from rural depopulation and braindrain.

Again you pre suppose that the people of whom you speak, do not have the ability to make their own choices. They do and make those choices all the time.

With respect to energy supply in this country, we need to look at how we plan to use energy in the future first. Spirit of Ireland hasn't really looked at this in so much detail prior to their insane stupid PR launch a few months ago until people started reminding them that certain energy requirements meant that their clarion call that they could make the country energy independent was unlikely to hit fruition.

See my signature, we should have said electrical independence, and yet many people did understand our clarion call, very many as it happens.

We currently have a mix of renewables and fossil fuel generation systems in place. We have one storage facility I believe, and renewables are mainly from hydro and to a far lesser extent, wind. Ultimately in the long term, we will have to look for alternatives. The main choices appear to be wind, tidal and nuclear.

Renewables are mainly wind and hydro is very much in second place, you say ultimately we need to look at this, the time is now when we can take advantage of the low prices of commodities and we need the economic stimulus now, not in the future.

It's been pointed out that nuclear is politically difficult. Wind only works with storage and tidal is currently still in a preliminary phase. Nuclear will probably also require storage facilities if the set up in France is anything to go by.

100% correct

In principle, I don't have any objections to wind power being harnessed to generate electricity although I have severe reservations about current practice in building some of those windfarms in the middle of our carbon sinks. Given a choice between maintaining the carbon sinks and importing electricity, I would prefer to import electricity.

Or you could develop wind and maintain those carbon sinks, which I assume mean our blanket bogs. S of I have devoted a lot of thought to how to this.
From porous foundations to the methods required to excavate those foundations without doing any real damage to those bogs. If your honest concern is carbon capture, algae farms are much more efficient at capturing carbon than peat and have the added advantage that they can provide both biomass or bio fuels, which of course go further towards that energy independence goal.

In stating that you would prefer to import electricity you obviously do not consider the effects of this policy on our economy, none of them are good.

I have never voiced any opposition to using renewable energies. You do yourself a disservice to assume opposition to Spirit of Ireland's currently less than competent looking project planning also equates to an opposition to renewable energies.

I am not against renewables. I am against Spirit of Ireland's project for the simple reason that they don't appear to be competent to implement a project of this nature at this point in time.

If you can't understand the difference, nothing I say will make it any easier for you.

I have told you before that S of I consists of a small number of volunteers, the core group is at present 23 people, there is no commercial entity and we exist solely to promote our belief that renewable's without storage will not work. We have used our own money and ingenuity to get a large amount of research and studies done and will present this work over the next few weeks. Only when the population and the government are fully informed of the requirements and costs of building a very strong industry will a company be formed to actually build the project. This entity will employ the required talent to ensure its success.

@Hal

currently I am devoid of faith that Spirit of Ireland can make this happen in the way they depicted in their initial PR. Given that they will not be able to provide energy independence in 5 years and will not be able to decommission the fossil fuel plants in that time either and will need to import via the interconnector when a) the wind doesn't blow and b) the storage runs out, key selling points of their PR are redundant at this stage. Sustainable Energy Ireland, incidently, has not been overwhelming in their belief that Spirit of Ireland can deliver either.


In my view, Spirit of Ireland's approach runs the risk of damaging the possibilities offered by renewables given their hamfisted efforts to date. I gave up on their own forum because they frankly didn't have answers to any questions that are standard for a project which they had already costed. A key one related to the number of wind turbines - the last estimate which may have changed was 2500-3000. There's a big difference between those two figures. Likewise for the storage. Igor S on their forum, in direct response to "how many pumped storage systems do you need to build" came back with an answer between 2 and 4. As each of them were costed at around a billion euro at the time, that difference again represents a major costing difference.


Spirit of Ireland have not gone about this in any professional or competent manner at all. Questions regarding flooding western valleys have not had what I would consider useful responses.

As such I don't support this project although elements of the concept are okay with me as outlined above.

I will allow Hal to respond if he so desires, I will however make the following points.

The amount of turbines has not changed, phase one requires 2500 turbines in the correct high resource locations.

As regards storage.

There are about fifty locations of various capacity and of course various cost, none will cost more than €800 million, although the cost benefit analysis will vary considerably from site to site, you may be surprised to learn that we actually believe the environmental reports will finally decide which of those sites are built. And of course we believe that they should be built one at a time or in a staggered schedule. Finally we are actively talking to the locals and land owners in the most desirable sites for both storage and wind turbines, as we speak, with absolutely zero opposition to date.