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

https://www.iwea.com/latest-news/2190-iwea-publishes-first-quarterly-wind-report

by ljf • 7 years ago

122 94 7 years ago

scandox• 7 years ago

What 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?

ljf6• 7 years ago

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

samber3• 7 years ago

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.

imtringued• 7 years ago

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.

Double_a_922• 7 years ago

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

tialaramex3• 7 years ago

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.

dexen• 7 years ago

Thank 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.

ljf6• 7 years ago

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...

tiernano2• 7 years ago

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

sjwright• 7 years ago

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.

OisinMoran3• 7 years ago

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.

vixen99• 7 years ago

its electricity

reitzensteinm2• 7 years ago

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.

njepa• 7 years ago

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

anonymousDan• 7 years ago

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

teh_klev2• 7 years ago

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 :)

_ph_2• 7 years ago

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.

shatnersbassoon• 7 years ago

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.

Lucadg• 7 years ago

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.

latchkey• 7 years ago

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.

jabl3• 7 years ago

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!

ljf6• 7 years ago

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!

davnicwil3• 7 years ago

Oh 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.

slartibardfast02• 7 years ago

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?

davnicwil3• 7 years ago

I 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.

Tade0• 7 years ago

There's an interesting phenomenon connected to this:

http://dinaburg.org/bitsquatting.html

cr18953• 7 years ago

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.

OisinMoran3• 7 years ago

Great 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_klev2• 7 years ago

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

/gets coat.

sambe2• 7 years ago

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.

evandijk70• 7 years ago

While 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.

pjfin• 7 years ago

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.

theBobBob• 7 years ago

Interesting 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.

illys3• 7 years ago

It 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_922• 7 years 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.

illys3• 7 years ago

Yes I agree, and it should be counted everywhere.

NeedMoreTea5• 7 years ago

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

illys3• 7 years ago

The problem of the "pay back" is that the CO2 they emit is still in the air: the mill does not absorb CO2.

In addition there are different ways to compute a "pay back":

- you may compare the e-kWh production and the fossil-kWh spent to build... Certainly pointless but useful to display short "pay back" durations.

- you may compare your electricity production with the production of the nearby fossil-plant that you pretend to avoid... More realistic, but your project will have different "pay back" depending on the neighborhood you consider (immediate neighbor, regional mix, national mix...).

I can understand such computations in the transition stage where we are, but in the end, each project should be considered for its own [electricity production]/[fossil emissions] ratio across its construction and lifespan.

cr18953• 7 years ago

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."

samber3• 7 years ago

Today, 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&rem...

electricityUser• 7 years ago

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?

ElKrist4• 7 years ago

You 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

yodsanklai2• 7 years ago

I think it re-enforces the confusion that wind/solar is the best strategy to reduce CO2 emissions. It may be in some places, but not everywhere, it may even be counter-productive. For instance, France has low CO2 emission as most of its electricity is from nuclear plants. If global warming is the most immediate treat, it would make little sense to dismantle them now. There are much better investments to make than buying solar panels. That's an issue I'm having with the green party in France who doesn't seem to recognize this.

jajag• 7 years ago

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

pjc502• 7 years ago

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

endorphone• 7 years ago

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.

dalbasal2• 7 years ago

Also, I don't think it's true. It is currently windy in dublin.

dalbasal2• 7 years ago

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.

talideon5• 7 years ago

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.

NeedMoreTea5• 7 years ago

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

Huh? How does that follow? Besides I thought Ireland started and abandoned building a nuclear plant sometime in the 70s.

I know nuclear is currently prohibited there, but not why, only that it was fairly recent.

holri3• 7 years ago

Wind turbines are destroying the landscape

cr18953• 7 years ago

Personally I think the offshore arrays are beautiful.

Eldt• 7 years ago

Pollution is destroying the landscape

holri3• 7 years ago

yes, for sure

ljf6• 7 years ago

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.

holri3• 7 years ago

In 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.

ben_w5• 7 years ago

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?

NotPaidToPost2• 7 years ago

Unfortunately 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.

_ph_2• 7 years ago

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.

cesarb• 7 years 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.

NotPaidToPost2• 7 years ago

You misunderstood. The grid must still be dimensioned in terms of production capacity as if wind power did not exist.

yazr• 7 years ago

Ireland 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 ..)

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

Related Stories