Wind provided 37 per cent of Ireland’s electricity in Q1 2019

It's not only wasting energy that the wind turbines could be generating. Power grids also have to maintain reserve and contingency so that if the wind suddenly dies everywhere (unlikely, but possible) they can more or less immediately compensate so the grid doesn't desynchronize. This is very expensive and inefficient. A storage solution that is co-located with the turbines would be optimal, as the best sources of wind are often far from urban areas. This means that quite often even if the power is required by the grid, it can't be used as grid constraints don't allow it. Violating grid transmission constraints leads to drooping power lines and cows exploding in fields (this is not an exaggeration).

Source: I designed the control room systems for electricity balancing for National Grid in the UK.

Well, that's ~100 kWh per car on the road in Ireland, or about the capacity of a full Tesla. The transition to EVs is going to go hand in hand with the transition to renewables, because then you've got a significant amount of demand you can switch on and off at will (or run in reverse, in the case of battery to grid systems).

The future will probably look something like: under normal use, you set your 100kWh car to be able to use half of its battery for grid stabilization, and in return receive charging at perhaps 1/4 the standard price. If you're planning a longer range trip, you turn that off and your full battery is waiting for you.

Those €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!

As someone from the west of Ireland, if we could capture all the wind we could probably power the whole of Europe :)

Would it make sense for crypto mining farms to be placed close to the source and pay for the wasted energy thus subsidizing the turbines? I often hear this theory but I wonder wether the economics make sense.

Yes, I think it's also worth noting that the way it is currently set up, the Irish grid can't take more than 50% of its electricity from renewables. So storage should really help here, in terms of matching supply to demand and smoothing things out.

yea, wonder if using something like Tesla's battery thing that they deployed in Australia and the like would work here...

Read this book on peat use in Ireland a while back -> 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...

[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.

Might be a typo and they meant "MebiWatt" :)

/gets coat.

Immediately 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.

Saying this is greenwashing is rather extraordinary doublespeak and is an element of the contrarian cynicism that just muddies the waters.

Ireland relied upon overwhelmingly greenhouse gas producing power generation in years past. This year they're on target to hit 1/3 of their power generation from wind power. That is fantastic, and is a remarkable accomplishment. There is no "greenwashing". Throwing in the momentary wind percentage is absurd in the context.

We also have interconnects that pull power from the UK and soon France too.

We're fully aware of our dependence on fossil fuels (though what's down in that map as 'coal' for Ireland is mostly actually turf, not coal). The whole point of this exercise is to move away from it and diversify our energy sources.

The whole point of interconnects is so that as we ramp up on renewable sources, we need some way to smooth out the ramp-up and ramp-down.

We already produce/store as much from hydro as we can. We have the same issue as the Netherlands has in that Ireland is a relatively flat country.

Negligence in the UK regarding their nuclear energy sector pretty much killed any chance of a nuclear power plant ever existing on the island of Ireland. That might chance when practical non-fissile nuclear sources come along, but not yet.

This isn't greenwashing: this is a sign of progress. Nobody expects a single renewable source to be a panacea, nor that they'll eliminate the need for non-renewables any time soon. However, they do allow us to transition to a state where we're less dependent on them and can stretch out our supply.

Since 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?

Precisely - we're still going to miss our CO2 reduction targets by a mile: https://www.rte.ie/news/environment/2019/0515/1049589-carbon...

Could have fooled me. I'm standing at a shop front right now to get out from the wind & rain.

But it's true, we're not the best example of clean power relative to nearby countries. That said, wind is going ok.

There's not many suitable sites for hydro in Ireland that aren't already used.

> probably quite good feature.

Strikes me as similar to the issue I have with Google thinking I typed something wrong into search, and instead serves me whatever their algorithm thinks I wanted, but is actually not at all what I wanted and what I typed into search wasn't incorrect.

I find that quite frustrating. It wasn't like that in the past.

There's an interesting phenomenon connected to this:

http://dinaburg.org/bitsquatting.html

Is 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?

If 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.

To 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.

Your 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.

Quote: 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

All produced energy spread equally over the whole year it was produced it. It's nothing deceiving if you were suspecting that.

The 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.

How 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?

Pollution is destroying the landscape

Personally I think the offshore arrays are beautiful.

If 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.

> 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.

>However there is often no word on the fossil consumption for producing, transporting and installing the huge wind machines.

There is plenty of research into this. Some terms you can use are "life cycle assessment" and "energy returned on energy invested."

There's a Fully Charged episode on Youtube that looked into this. Hammer's Hill Wind Farm on Orkney paid off their installation and construction CO2 debt in the first 45 days of operation. Despite there being 500 tons of concrete and steel in each base.

https://youtu.be/FXe1hBvlylw?t=87

> 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.