8 ms·
Wind provided 37 per cent of Ireland’s electricity in Q1 2019
- scandox 7y agoWhat exactly does this figure mean? I see in Wikipedia this interesting line: "Ireland's instantaneous wind power generation fluctuates between near zero and 3,071 MW[1] due to weather,[6] with an average capacity factor of 32.3% in 2015." Can someone unpack that? What precisely is an average capacity factor?
- ljf 7y agoQuote: The net capacity factor is the unitless ratio of an actual electrical energy output over a given period of time to the maximum possible electrical energy output over that period. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capacity_factor https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capacity_factor
- samber 7y agoIf a wind turbine of 2MW (of "capacity" or "max load") produces 5256 MWh in 1y, the average load (or yield) is 5256 MWh / 365 days / 24 hours / 2 MW = 0.3 Some day it will be near 0 (0% efficiency), or near 0.9 (90% efficiency). It depend on weather conditions.
- imtringued 7y agoYour magic 1 hour per day powerplant is rated at 1000W. It produces all energy at midnight for one hour. If you had infinite energy storage and distributed the energy across all 24 hours you could produce 42W every hour. 42W divided by the rated production capacity (1000W) is 4.2% which is the average capacity factor. It is useful because renewables don't generate as much as is written on their nameplate. A 1kW solar panel does not generate power all day and we have to account for that.
- Double_a_92 7y agoAll produced energy spread equally over the whole year it was produced it. It's nothing deceiving if you were suspecting that.
- tialaramex 7y agoTo add to the useful technical descriptions people have given, here are some real world types of power plant to consider with typical capacity factors and explanations: A real world fusion power plant ("nuclear") basically runs as close as they can to 100% flat out 24/7 so their capacity factor is the fraction of the time their plant is not undergoing maintenance, refuelling or other disruptions. They might have a 95% capacity factor. They do this because their fuel (e.g. uranium) is so cheap compared to the cost of owning a power plant that it always makes sense to make electricity at any price. An old-fashioned coal plant uses relatively expensive fuel, coal, which somebody has to be paid a lot of money to dig out of the ground and transport to them. It also costs money to clean the smoke from the plant so that it's less toxic as required by environmental laws in most places. Their plant could achieve nearly the same ratios as the fusion plant, but it would only make sense to do that if electricity was very expensive - when prices are low the plant idles, since running it would cost more than you'd earn selling electricity. As a result capacity factor might be 10% or lower at an older coal plant. This is why nobody (to a first approximation) is building new ones. The photovoltaic solar plant produces "free" electricity when the sun shines. It's fairly low maintenance, and so basically you get a capacity factor that depends almost directly on how much the sun shines. When it's cloudy or the sun is low in the sky it produces much less power, at night it produces nothing. Capacity factor for such a plant may be about 20%. Electricity from a Wind turbine is also nearly free. Sometimes it runs at night, but it's even less predictable. July is always good for PV panels in the North, but this July might bring a whole month of calm winds or several epic storms for the wind turbines and we've no way to know. Capacity factors for a particular turbine depend on location a lot, but 30% as here would be fairly typical. Modern Combined Cycle Gas turbines again could hit a fairly high capacity factor, but since operating them is far from free (gas is cheaper than coal, but not THAT much cheaper) they are used to make up the difference between demand and cheap supply because they can be "spun up" quickly and you can quickly build as many as your country needs if you have a way to feed them gas. So in practice you might see 50% capacity factor but that could fall a lot if storage (for the cheaper renewals and fusion) undercuts it.
- dexen 7y agoThank you for the excellent explainer. A minor nitpick: >A real world fusion power plant ("nuclear") Certainly you meant to write fission power plant (splitting of heavy nuclei) as the real world nuclear we're presently using. However, the point will probably also stand for the future fusion (combining light nuclei) power plants. Presuming we'll run them mostly with the cheap hydrogen for fuel (as opposed to the expensive deuterium), and presuming the operations will not require frequent, expensive maintenance.
- ljf 7y agoQuote: Amount of wind energy dispatched down in Q1 2019: 207,839 MWh Dispatched down means that potential generation is turned off. Amazing that so much energy was 'wasted' - I look forward to seeing the storage/use solutions that come about to take advantage or this 'free' energy and turn it into something useful. To put this into context this is about €13.4 million worth of electricity - if it were able to be sold at a standard Eire market rate. But while the standard wholesale MWh rate in the Eire is about €67, the instant dispatch rate in Ireland can reach €4000 - so if all that energy could be made available for instant dispatch it could be worth €800000000 - if my sums are correct. Obviously this is ignoring losses. But even with 50% loss this is a significant opportunity. Who is in? https://www.greentechmedia.com/articles/read/price-spikes-ireland-dispatchable-power-europe https://www.greentechmedia.com/articles/read/price-spikes-ir...
- jabl 7y agoThose €4000 prices are when demand outstrips supply. Which likely is when wind is generating 0. Ps.: While such high prices are annoying for customers, they are critical to drive investment into low carbon dispatchable capacity like batteries, pumped hydro, or nuclear. Legislating some roof on the price will make the problem worse, not solve it!
- ljf 7y agoTotally! If we could just store that 'wasted' energy and release it at peak times we could go a long way to improving the overall energy mix - but I know that is no easy or cheap fix!
- tiernano 7y agoyea, wonder if using something like Tesla's battery thing that they deployed in Australia and the like would work here...
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- sjwright 7y ago
- fenk85 7y agoFrom, Ireland that is great BUT we have one of the highest electricity prices in Europe (and i regularly change providers every 1-2 years and have night saver) My last bill (37 day period) was for EUR128.40 for 716 kWh
- davnicwil 7y agoOh interesting, using Brave I get the following warning message opening that link, similar to a invalid ssl certificate warning with an option to proceed: "Did you mean ikea.com? The link that you originally opened is unusual" (the domain is iwea.com) Totally off topic but an interesting and probably quite good feature. Doesn't happen in Chrome for me so must be something Brave specifically implemented.
- slartibardfast0 7y agoIs it? iwea.com is perfectly legitimate albeit niche with a valid https cert. Doesn't this feature just push brave further down a route of acting as curators of a private version of the web, favouring larger (or partnered) websites?
- davnicwil 7y agoI see your point. It's obviously legitimate and a false positive in this case, but you do have a very clear option to ignore and proceed if you went there with intent, so it doesn't actually really get in your way if you did mean to go to the article. It's not hidden away like with the ssl cert warning. Saying this is curating or favouring certain websites I think is a very big leap. The intent is obviously to prevent typo injection/phishing attacks which are very much used in the wild, and I think it's likely to do overwhelmingly more good than harm because there are, I'd assume, far more instances of that than edge cases of domains which are very similar to known brand names.
- slartibardfast0 7y agosure, and if if the algorithm was publicly documented and focused on plishing (site structure, visual similarities), I'd be far less concerned about future manipulation. Gatekeeping like this is a very powerful tool. FWIW in the general keyboard use case the letter K isn't even typo-able to W with the same typing hand!!
- davnicwil 7y ago
- OisinMoran 7y agoGreat news! Ireland needs to become less reliant on coal and peat, two of the absolute worst energy sources in terms of pollution. Funny quote from the article: "A single megawatt is equivalent to around 1,000 kilowatts." A single megawatt is equivalent to _exactly_ 1,000 kilowatts.
- teh_klev 7y agoMight be a typo and they meant "MebiWatt" :) /gets coat.
- sambe 7y agoImmediately followed by: "Boiling a kettle, for example, takes around two kilowatts." I guess that was a very small amount of water or it was already pretty hot.
- evandijk70 7y agoWhile I agree that the word 'boiling' should probably be replaced by 'running', the power draw of a typical kettle is indeed around 2 kilowatts. The amount of water or the starting temperature is not relevant for the power, but just for the total energy required, measured in kWh.
- sambe 7y agoYou are right. I mis-read the latter part due to the former implying total energy.
- pjfin 7y agoRead this book on peat use in Ireland a while back -> http://www.books.ie/brown-gold-a-history-of-bord-na-mona-and-the-irish-peat-industry http://www.books.ie/brown-gold-a-history-of-bord-na-mona-and... It was part of DeValeras mad drive for "national self-sufficiency" back in the 40s and 50s. The inefficiency of the plants is mind-boggling. Peat burns at an extremely low heat in comparison to coal or gas. Another interesting article on why peat is such a bad idea -> https://www.irishtimes.com/news/environment/why-peat-is-most-damaging-fuel-in-terms-of-global-warming-even-worse-than-coal-1.3674537 https://www.irishtimes.com/news/environment/why-peat-is-most... [peat] has a lower calorific value than coal (generating less energy per tonne when it is burned) and yet it produces higher CO2 emissions per unit, so it is the least climate-efficient way to produce electricity or heat in Ireland bar none.
- theBobBob 7y agoInteresting thing about electricity bills in Ireland is that we pay a Public Service Obligation Levy on every bill. Part of that goes to subsidising investment in renewable energy to help reduce emissions. The other part of it goes to subsidising electricity generation using peat which is even worse than coal for emissions so the good and the bad might cancel each other out. In their defence, they are phasing out using peat but I just am annoyed at it.
- Proven 7y ago> Interesting thing about electricity bills in Ireland is that we pay a Public Service Obligation Levy on every bill. Even more interesting would be if that subsidy wasn't calculated as cost of "renewable" energy to make it appear artificially cheaper.
- illys 7y agoIt is great we focus on renewable production and I feel it is what we should do at the stage we are. However there is often no word on the fossil consumption for producing, transporting and installing the huge wind machines. I guess that "grey" energy should be deducted from the yearly renewable production per windmill with a formula like [mill construction fossil energy]/[average life of the windmill in years]. Showing such digits: 1) would discard projects that have a global negative renewable impact (when considering construction). 2) is a critical incentive to decrease the fossil footprint in renewable installation constructions (wind / sun / hydro...). Indeed there is a possibility to fuel the industries and trucks with see-water and green-electricity produced hydrogen... But it costs more than petrol and no one can be competitive in such effort if it is not valued to the public by fossil-use transparency and advertisement.
- Double_a_92 7y ago> However there is often no word on the fossil consumption for producing, transporting and installing the huge wind machines. I assume those "grey" costs would also apply for any other energy source. You always need some kind of plant where you eventually produce and distribute the electricity.
- illys 7y agoYes I agree, and it should be counted everywhere.
- strainer 7y agoIts actually very complicated matter to count [1]. But if you look into winds "carbon footprint" you should find it is widely regarded as having one of the lowest overall emissions, about 1-2% of natural gas generations footprint. [1] https://www.climatexchange.org.uk/media/1461/main_report_-_life_cycle_costs_and_carbon_emissions_of_offshore_wind_power.pdf https://www.climatexchange.org.uk/media/1461/main_report_-_l...
- mrpopo 7y agoWhat you are talking about is called "Life cycle inventory analysis" of and is of course counted in the carbon footprint of a given technology, yes. Manufacturing energy costs are especially important for solar, which requires important amounts of energy for silicon purification and "monocrystallinization" (there must be a more adequate word). Wind power manufacturing costs are on par with other technologies.
- samber 7y agoToday, there is no wind in Ireland (only 5% load) They use coal, gaz and oil instead. They are producing almost 500g of eq-CO2 per KWh. This is a greenwashing post. Ireland produce a lot of greenhouse gas in power generation. Countries with low emissions use hydro-electricity or nuclear reactors. Data here => https://www.electricitymap.org/?page=country&solar=false&remote=true&wind=true&countryCode=IE https://www.electricitymap.org/?page=country&solar=false&rem...
- electricityUser 7y agoSince 37% is an average there ought to be periods with a lot more than 37% coming from wind if 5% phases happen from time to time as well. How is this greenwashing exactly?
- ElKrist 7y agoYou gave the answer in your own question. The fact that it is not a constant 37% is the problem here. What do you do when you get 10x less wind than the average? People still expect the same services (train, heaters..) to run
- talideon 7y agoThat's what interconnects partly are for. Ireland is an island, but its grid is no longer separated from the rest of Europe. We're getting closer to a point where, when we have a surplus, it can get sent elsewhere, and when we have a deficit, it can be pulled from elsewhere.
- ElKrist 7y agoSure. If you assume that electricity from renewables are randomly distributed in time across your grid then all countries can do that. Unfortunately it's not the case (it's night time in Ireland and France at roughly the same hours) and so this model relies on the fact that other countries have non intermittent power sources that can kick in when it's night time and there is no wind. You've just moved the problem
- holri 7y agoWind turbines are destroying the landscape
- ben_w 7y agoHow destructive compared to removing mountains to reach the coal, compared to strip-mining the peat, or compared to the sea level rises from CO2 induced climate change?
- cr1895 7y agoPersonally I think the offshore arrays are beautiful.
- Eldt 7y agoPollution is destroying the landscape
- holri 7y agoyes, for sure
- ljf 7y agoThe great thing about wind turbines (and solar panels) is that when/if they are decommissioned, the impact to the original landscape is minimal. I for one am happy to look out to wind turbines - and lets not forget that many of the most productive wind farms are now out to sea.
- holri 7y agoIn the 19th century the chimneys of the factories where modern, "beautiful" and a sign of progress. Turned out that what came out of those chimneys was not so great.
- NotPaidToPost 7y agoUnfortunately that does not solve anything. This is because the amount generated varies between 0 and the max. installed capacity at any time, depending on the weather. This means that in practice the grid must still assume 0 in order to avoid blackouts. It does not mean that other sources can be wound down because wind produces 37% of electricity needs.
- cesarb 7y ago> This means that in practice the grid must still assume 0 in order to avoid blackouts. It does not mean that other sources can be wound down because wind produces 37% of electricity needs. On any electric grid, production must always be precisely matched to consumption; producing more than is consumed results in the voltage and/or frequency becoming too high, with destructive results. Therefore, the grid cannot "assume 0"; it must reduce production until it matches the instantaneous consumption. For obvious reasons, grid operators prefer to reduce the most expensive sources first, which are usually the fossil fuel thermal plants. So in practice, for every kW of wind-generated power, one less kW of fossil fuel electricity is generated; and due to how thermal power plants work, the easiest way to reduce generation is to burn less fuel.
- NotPaidToPost 7y agoYou misunderstood. The grid must still be dimensioned in terms of production capacity as if wind power did not exist.
- _ph_ 7y agoIf the complementing fossil source is gas, the power plants can be regulated quickly enough to follow the wind production. So every percent more wind power means, that the corresponding amout of gas is not burnt. And no CO2 for it is produced.
- Proven 7y agoConsumers pay for extra power generating capacity that they have no use for and would prefer not to pay for (if there was any chance they would, it wouldn't be forced onto them). "No CO2 is produced" doesn't mean anything to them.
- yazr 7y agoIreland has ~10GW generation capacity (mostly coal & extra dirty peat). At around $1/W for new solar and wind generation, the Apple back taxes owned to Ireland can convert the entire Island to renewable energy. It will be an asset that generates income for 30 years. (yes, ok, more storage needed, and interconnect to the UK, and keep some gas as backup ..)