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Comment by ljf | Hacker News Reader

Quote: 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-ir...

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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.

Are those batteries actually good enough at cycling that this would work though? What is the cost of degradation?

Vehicle to grid isn't required for what I'm describing; as a first step you can just allow the grid to decide when to charge the cars, which will account for ~20% of total electricity consumption.

Tesla claims their latest battery packs will be good for 1 million miles; if true, they'll be more than good enough for vehicle to grid use.

Even with today's endurance levels though, there will always be some amount of vehicle to grid transfers use that would make sense, since you can use it to shave off expensive peaks in demand. I don't know about Ireland, but in Australia that gets extremely costly:

https://www.afr.com/news/policy/climate/wholesale-power-pric...

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!

Totally! 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!

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

I just read that there is a huge powerline being built from Ireland to France, so Ireland could become a large electricty exporter to the continental Europe. This could work in both directions, while wind strength in one place can vary strongly over time, the larger scale you connect regions together, the less fluctuation there is.

As someone who used to live in north west Donegal, I completely agree. I think we had about two days a year where the wind didn't blow a minor gale :)

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.

https://www.coinmint.io/data-centers/

Not wind, but hydro and similar usecase. The Massena facility is in an old Alcoa aluminum smelter plant. Electricity comes from the nearby Moses-Saunders Power Dam.

The smelter used to draw a consistent amount of power to keep the pots hot. Now, that the smelter shut down, coinmint is taking over and drawing a consistent rate of power using the miners. The consistent power draw is good for the equipment at the dam.

Using the power closer to the source is also better than transmitting it elsewhere at a loss.

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.

its electricity

If you're suggesting that once it's electricity it's all the same you're somewhat right, but one of the issues is the variability of renewables. Available wind power can fluctuate wildly, going from 30% to nothing in a day, and a solid baseline of power is needed. In Ireland. this baseline is currently provided mainly by coal and gas plants which despite the pollution, are steady and reliable. A cleaner alternative for this baseline generation would be nuclear power but sadly I don't see that happening in Ireland any time soon.

I suspect the poster is being pedantic about "its" vs "it's"

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

The battery in South Australia provides fine grained stability—smoothing out demand with near-instant response times. Unless you want to install a battery ten times larger again, you still need some way of storing large amounts of generated electricity.

Pumped hydro is a great option if the geography allows for it.

Yea. Ireland had the first one here in Europe. Went on an open day a few years back. Impressive bit of kit.

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