Eirgrid almost ran short of electricity last week

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One of the biggest consumers of that pharma/IT ilk is Amazon, who have committed to 100% renewable energy and are actively investing in solar and wind farm in Ireland. Might suggest they are not quite so concerned?
 
The irish academy of engineers have issued a report on the security of the irish electricity network upto 2030. In their opinion we will need to increase the gas generating capacity and build new power stations in order to maintain the reliability of the grid. They also warned about the wisdom of not looking for new gas supplies off the irish coast as we will be highly dependant on russian gas as the UK gas supplies will also be gone by 2030. here is an excerpt


Conclusions and Recommendations
In order to maintain normal reliability standards while replacing coal, oil and peat generation, Ireland will require significant gas fired generation capacity for the next two decades. The gas turbine generation capacity required in 2030 is likely to increase from today, but annual gas consumption will probably reduce as generating units will operate with lower load factors, but peak gas demand, for power generation will be significantly higher than today. Power system reliability is therefore critically dependent on secure primary energy supplies (Natural Gas) to the Island of Ireland.

Power system reliability becomes an Energy Security issue.

There is universal agreement that long term decarbonisation of the planet’s energy systems requires a major shift to electricity as an energy vector. Ireland has targeted nine hundred thousand Electric Vehicles (EVs) on the road by 2030 as well as six hundred thousand domestic heat pumps. In this context, a failure of the power system would have a catastrophic effect on normal economic life.
 
At least we are consistent; we export our environmental pollution by preventing the production of dirty products here but still import them from abroad. Now we have a long term strategy to enable a police state which actively seeks to damage our interests and undermine out freedoms.
 
Yes, we're really treated like Uyghurs here. NOT.
 
fidelcastro said:
Yes, we're really treated like Uyghurs here. NOT.
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What?

I'm talking about giving Russia a strategic lever which it can use to control EU foreign policy. We are overwhelmingly reliant on them for our supply of natural gas and have adopted policies which only strengthens their position.
There's no environmental value of stopping the search for hydrocarbons within our territorial waters if we continue to burn imported hydrocarbons. There is considerable geopolitical damage when our primary source for those hydrocarbons is a police state which actively seeks to damage us.
I take from your username that you have some sympathy for dictators but I'm a fan of free democracies.
 
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I think fidelcastro may have misread your original post the same way I did. I thought you were implying Ireland was becoming a police state (lockdowns, mandatory quarantine etc), it's a common narrative in the press at the moment. Makes a lot more sense now and I fully agree with you!
 
Purple, excellent post. I misread your intent same as Zenith..!
No sympathy for dictatorships but also against hard core capitalism aswell. For common sense social justice economics as practiced/ impremented by wealthiest countries of the world viz : nordics..
 
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I see the eirgrid warnings on shortages were very real last winter they were lucky to get away without power cuts. Now they have got permission from the government to install emergency generators in Dublin to cope with shortages next winter as demand is increasing rapidly but not continuous 24hrs supply. Calls into question the decision to prematurely shut down the Midlands power stations when they still had another decade of life in them. Those emergency generators will be burning diesel much more inefficiently than a dedicated power station.
 
I am still puzzled to how electricity consumption only fell 0.4% last year despite cinemas, pubs, sports facilities, restaurants, offices, etc closed for a large part of the year. One can only assume that domestic consumption fully offset the reduction in the service sector.

The eirgrid data tell you a lot about supply but not about where demand is.
 
So are Saudi Arabian oil and gas fields, they have stored up carbon and energy from millions of years of sunshine. In comparison.to what China and India are going to pump into the atmosphere the Midlands power stations were negligible. We shut them down without having a replacement and still with millions of euros of infrastructure investment wasted. Decisions were made because of wrong headed environmental dogma rather than realistic practical concerns
 
joe sod said:
So are Saudi Arabian oil and gas fields, they have stored up carbon and energy from millions of years of sunshine.
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Bogs are actively sequestering additional CO2, oil/gas fields are not. Bogs are a big part of our biodiversity, oil/gas fields are not. Peat is an exceptionally dirty fuel to burn compared to oil/gas, both in-terms of CO2 but also other pollutants which are realistically much more dangerous to us in our lifetimes (unlike CO2 which we're really trying to control on behalf of future generations).

Unless I start seeing blackouts I will trust that EirGrid have taken considered risks to drive us towards a cleaner future, we have a long way to go and years of inaction have us starting in a worse place than many peer countries.
 
joe sod said:
Decisions were made because of wrong headed environmental dogma rather than realistic practical concerns
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The decision was made to keep them open for as long as they were running because of wrong headed dogma rather than realistic practical concerns. We should have stopped cutting or burning our bogs 30 years ago. Stupid mutton-headed knuckle-dragging mouth-breathers who ignore science and the real issues were the empty vessels making all the local noise and, given the gombeen nature of Irish politics, those people were listened to.
 
Purple said:
Stupid mutton-headed knuckle-dragging mouth-breathers who ignore science and the real issues were the empty vessels making all the local noise and, given the gombeen nature of Irish politics, those people were listened to.
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maybe you are correct but thats an overall observation of irish politics its not unique to turf cutting and using peat to generate electricity. In any case those gombeens are gone and have now been replaced by the modern version in the green party. The fact is that in the Eirgrid plan those stations were to be operated until 2025 until replacement generation like gas could be brought online.

However they were refused planning permission to continue until then, when exactly did the planning authority get permission to stop an already existing generating station that now turns out to be in critical need? Now the government are to pass emergency legislation to bypass those very planning laws in order to install emergency generators in Dublin, it is so critical that the government needs them in place by November

"To facilitate the coalition, is steering a legislation through the Dail so that emergency generators can bypass planning laws. "

an extract from the irish times article. So they are now going to bypass planning laws in order to get these up and running, would it not have been simpler just to rescind the power of the planning authorities in the case of the midlands generating stations until replacements were ready. Whats the difference ? thats the real gombeen politics and its alive and well and living in Dublin4 not Ballygobackwards
 
joe sod said:
However they were refused planning permission to continue until then, when exactly did the planning authority get permission to stop an already existing generating station that now turns out to be in critical need?
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If they were refused permission then they must have applied right? It would follow that conditions applied to previous grants stipulated some limitation they were applying to have altered. It's all online, why not look it up?
 
joe sod said:
would it not have been simpler just to rescind the power of the planning authorities in the case of the midlands generating stations until replacements were ready. Whats the difference ?
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From an environmental perspective the generators are better. Burning Peat is like burning Rainforest.
joe sod said:
thats the real gombeen politics and its alive and well and living in Dublin4 not Ballygobackwards
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I do agree that there is a fundamental lack of planning on this issue but that's not unique. In fact it is ubiquitous. I'm not sure how many politicians or employees in the Departments concerned live in D4 though.
 
Leo said:
If they were refused permission then they must have applied right? It would follow that conditions applied to previous grants stipulated some limitation they were applying to have altered. It's all online, why not look it up?
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Yes they had to apply and were refused by an bord planeala to burn biomass, in fact they were forced to decommission the plant as well even though barely half way through its lifespan, the option to use other fuels and keep it in operation was also taken away. That was stupid and gombeen politics when barely a year later we are facing critical shortages in power.
I raised this issue about eirgrid facing critical shortages last winter and this was rubbished by some posters on this site and it was ignored by the media. Now it turns out to have been a very serious situation which explains why the government are now rushing to get these generators installed before next winter.
I predict they will not be able to get these installed by winter and will have to resort to diesel generators. I'm sure the unfortunate residents in Dublin would prefer to have this power generated down the country rather than beside them by noisy generators
 
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Seriously, is this even a major issue for Ireland? According to the European Environmental Agency Ireland produces 60,744 kilotonnes C02 equivalent greenhouse gas emissions https://www.europarl.europa.eu/reso...0191015PHT64308/20191015PHT64308_original.jpg. This is 1.41% of total EU greenhouse gas emissions. Relative to other countries we don't really pollute at all. The risk here is that Ireland will accept EU controls more appropriate for the high polluting countries and in doing so will place this country at a relative competititve disadvantage.
 

"Ireland had the third highest emissions of greenhouse gases per capita in the EU in 2015 at 13.2 tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent per capita. Ireland’s emissions were 50% higher than the EU average of 8.8 tonnes. Estonia and Luxembourg had the highest levels of CO2 emissions per capita in 2015 at 13.8 and 20.4 tonnes respectively." (https://www.cso.ie/en/releasesandpublications/ep/p-eii/eii18/greenhousegasesandclimatechange/)

I think those bigger countries might feel a bit aggrieved that they put so much money/effort into getting their per capita emissions down (much more relevant than per country numbers) while Ireland spent money on ??? but are now asking them to bear our burden. To be honest if the EU were allowing some smaller countries to opt out, not sure why they'd choose one of the worst per-capita polluters.
 
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PMU said:
This is 1.41% of total EU greenhouse gas emissions. Relative to other countries we don't really pollute at all.
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And even this figure is exaggerated because of the unfair way carbon from agriculture is calculated. Because we have a relatively small population and a relatively large agricultural output , we are in effect producing g food for the UK and Germany but we get levelled with the CO2 rather than UK or Germany. The fact is that if we cut back our agricultural output because of CO2 levies somebody else is still going to have to produce that food because brits and Germans still need to eat. Of course we could reduce our per capita CO2 levels by dramatically increasing our population, there is no CO2 penalty for that.
 
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