Consumers to pay for storm damage to the electricity distribution network?

In many ways, it was actually a stroke of luck that Storm Daragh preceded Storm Eowyn as the former took out a lot of trees and unstable sheds etc that couldn't fall a second time when Eowyn hit.

The aggregate damage was therefore spread over 2 months and was thus marginally easier to handle.
 
Which kind of refutes Dr Strangelove's point. Trees/structures which survived Strom Daragh came down in Storm Eowyn. It follows that trees/structures which survived Storm Eowyn may come down in a future storm.

Obviously each tree or structure can only fall once. But the intensity of storm winds can be highly local. Where I'm living now (in Australia), we had a storm a couple of years ago that took the roofs off two adjacent houses in one street, and then two adjacent houses in the parallel street, which were over the back wall from the first two houses. The other houses in both streets suffered only minor damage. There was nothing wrong with the houses that lost their roofs; they just happened to be in the line of a particularly savage gust. The gust could just as easily have been 100 metres north or south, in which case four different houses could have lost their roofs.
 
Dr Strangelove said:
would imagine the opposite.

Many trees in close proximity to wires fell over two weeks ago. Will take decades for new growth.
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Great point, probably the work done over the last 2 weeks has made the chances of a storm doing that much damage again very low. There is no point in over reacting to this either.
 
TomEdison said:
Where I'm living now (in Australia), we had a storm a couple of years ago that took the roofs off two adjacent houses in one street, and then two adjacent houses in the parallel street, which were over the back wall from the first two houses
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I doubt anyone in Australia is suggesting undergrounding power lines to make network more resilient . Be a bit ridiculous to be putting power lines underground in that vast country

Also Australia is one of the most carbon intensive countries on the planet, the amount of coal they dig out to send to China and to burn in their own power stations
 
joe sod said:
I doubt anyone in Australia is suggesting undergrounding power lines to make network more resilient . Be a bit ridiculous to be putting power lines underground in that vast country
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Actually there is a certain amount of undergrounding of power lines — it's an effective protection against fire, which is a signficant problem for electricity distribution. But that's mainly in outer suburban areas — in the bush, the distances are too great for undergrounding to be a viable measure for fire protection. Fire protection in the bush largely consists of trying to design, construct and maintain power infrastructure that won't itself cause fires to start. If fires start anyway — and they do — there's not a great deal you can do to protect the power infrastructure, so you invest in repair capacity and in local backup systems (generators, batteries).
joe sod said:
Also Australia is one of the most carbon intensive countries on the planet, the amount of coal they dig out to send to China and to burn in their own power stations
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Yes, all true. The fossil fuel component of Australian power generation has been reduced from 90% 25 years ago to about 65% today, of which 50% is black or brown coal. That's still massive. And that's before you look at coal exports to China and elsewhere.
 
TomEdison said:
That may mean some upgrading of the system to make it more physically resistant, but probably more redesigning of the total system so that local disruption due to physical damage doesn't have such severe consequences. So, e.g. more dispersed generating capacity; greater local storage capacity; etc. This is an engineering problem and I'm not an engineer but I do know that "there must be more investment in the power system to protect me from power failures and someone else must pay for it!" is not really an engineering solution.
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I am an engineer, and what you are suggesting, while sounding good in theory, is massively expensive. How many of the issues were on the high-voltage distribution network where resiliency is more practical (and has been increasing over the last few years, particularly after storm Ellen). Close to me a row of six houses on the same line required four separate breaks to be repaired. You can't protect against that level of damage at reasonable cost.
 
T McGibney said:
Every time we have a significant snow or frost weather event we have idiots suggesting we should have winter tyre mandates.
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Wouldn't it be kinder to say that what we have is well-intentioned do-gooders idiotically suggesting that we should have winter tyre mandates?
 
The winter tyres thing might be just like the suggestion that measures should be put in place to prevent the possibility of most storm damage and that ESB Networks should have a hundreds of additional repair crews on standby? They're ideas that all address an issue that feels like a big deal in the moment, but it's only when you get full details of the cost of protections against rare events that you realise the numbers don't stack up.
 
Always amazing the amount of experts that appear when something happens. There's a local who's an expert on virus transmission and immunology, international conflicts and war, and now he's an expert on power network and distribution. Also a weather expert. If only someone would give him a job. I must ask him about the tyres, I'm sure he'd know.
 
I think it’s time we start to have an honest conversation about the cost of rural housing and who should pay for it.

Yes the esb has two different standing charges for rural and urban. The rural is about 50% more. Or €35 a year more.

I don’t for a second think that covers the costs to maintain and repair the average rural house however I’m sure many will think it does. Just like how many believe the motor tax funds all the roads.

Outside of actual farming rural housing is about having the taxpayer subsidy a lifestyle.

I think a lot of people just don’t care about it but don’t actually know how much it’s costing them.
 
faketales said:
I think it’s time we start to have an honest conversation about the cost of rural housing and who should pay for it.
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I take it that you're anti-rural housing and would prefer if we all lived in towns and cities, apart from those employed directly in farming and agriculture enterprises who seem to get a pass because you like to eat well and cheaply on food that doesn't have thousands of carbon kilometers clocked up.

Any new build in the sticks is subject to costs of thousands of euro for planning, water, electricity, and sewerage costs. Rural dwellers must pay for trenches, cables, poles, labour, mini-substations, etc. a lot of the time before any construction work can commence on their living accommodations. Did you know that?

I don't for a second think that your urban standing charges will pay to repair the damage to your part of the distribution network that keeps you supplied with cheaper electricity than rural consumers, but the experts in ESB Networks, etc have allocated the charges as they are today. Complain to them if you wish or to ComReg. Let me know how that goes.

I take it you've had the old calculator out and you know what the differential between urban and rural rates is costing you. Give us a look at the sums, please.
 
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faketales said:
Yes the esb has two different standing charges for rural and urban. The rural is about 50% more. Or €35 a year more.
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This is true but as an urban dweller I get free water and wastewater treatment while hundreds of thousands of rural dwellings have their own wells and septic tanks.

I believe everyone should be charged something close to the economic cost of the utilities they consume. If that means much higher rural standing electricity charges and water charges for me then so be it.

Cross-subsidisation is more justified where you have positive network externalities with post and telecommunications.
 
Okay we rural dwellers will happily pay the extra few euro a month that we're currently costing you urban dwellers in standing charges - the price of a few Mars bars will I'm sure be a very useful saving to you - but on one condition: that you take back the legions of urban drug dealers and distributors who were dumped into struggling rural villages and towns since the 2008 crash.

I think that's a fair exchange.
 
mathepac said:
I take it that you're anti-rural housing and would prefer if we all lived in towns and cities, apart from those employed directly in farming and agriculture enterprises who seem to get a pass because you like to eat well and cheaply on food that doesn't have thousands of carbon kilometers clocked up.
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It's well documented that our pattern of once off rural houses is an outlier in Europe, and adds to the real cost of providing services, and makes the network more vulnerable to storms.

Other countries have more cluster based development, including countries with large agricultural sectors. That doesn't mean everyone living in towns and cities either.
 
Believe it or not in many parts of Europe farmers don’t live on their farmland and commute to their place of work like the rest of us.
 
That's because the farms are more akin to factories than what we understand as farms, with food quality and animal welfare implications to match. For example many continental cattle rarely if ever get to graze in fields and spend their lives, summer and winter, cooped up in sheds like chickens.

Don't worry, give it 20 years and those joys will be prevalent in Ireland too.
 
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