Does Wind Energy Reduce CO2 Emissions ?

There has been a lot of coverage recently about how much wind energy is contributing to the electricity grid, but how much CO2 is it really saving ?

The graphs below, based on data from eirgrid dashboard, show that on some days there is absolutely no savings at all.

The two days being compared are 23rd January 2020 and 29th of November 2019. Note that wind generation (blue) on 29th November is over 7 times that of 23rd January 2020 but CO2 emissions (in yellow) are virtually identical.

East West interconnector (in green) minus figures are exports, pluses are imports. At 329 grams CO2 on both days EWIC imports are very close 84 and 81 MW on the 23rd January 2020 and 76 and 1 MW 29th of November 2019 (circled). However, even though wind output is over 5 times higher on the 29th November, CO2 emissions remain static at 329. 

This raises serious questions about the effectiveness of wind energy in the irish grid. 

Thanks to John Dooley for providing the graphs. 

Irish Market Experiences High Levels of Negative Pricing

Since the introduction of the I-SEM in October 2018, Ireland has experienced a high level of negative pricing compared to other European markets. Prices dropped as low as minus €139.44 in February. Negative pricing occurs during periods of very high wind, mostly at night, when it becomes too expensive for power stations to switch off and then back on again when wind energy is low.

In such circumstances, it becomes cheaper for the power station to pay energy suppliers to take their power. It would be a bit like walking into a shop and seeing a negative price on a box of cereal i.e. they are paying customers to take their product.

Negative pricing is a new development in the Irish electricity market, but it is symptomatic of a problem that presumably has been happening for many years. If power stations are unable to switch off during periods of high wind then that means the co2 savings attributable to wind are much less than is often claimed.

In effect, it means we are running a duplicate system, with wind and fossil fuel /other renewables running in parallel with each other.

Power stations affected by negative pricing include other renewables such as biomass and waste to energy which are increasingly having to waste their output to facilitate more wind.

National Development Plan Short on Sums

Last week, the Government announced their plans for long term infrastructure spending that we, the already overtaxed taxpayer, will have to pay for. As is usual with these big PR events, they are big on glossy brochures but short on facts and critical analysis. Somehow the cognitive dissonance of Ministers announcing investments in airports while at the same time allocating €22bn to help fight "climate change" was lost on most of our media.

In this article, Pat Swords explores one part of the plan - electric cars.

This week our 'rulers' announced their plan for 2040. Let's just focus on one 'trendy' aspect:

• At least 500,000 electric vehicles on the road by 2030 with additional charging infrastructure to cater for planned growth
• No new non-zero emission vehicles to be sold in Ireland post 2030
• No NCT Cert will be issued for non-zero emission cars post 2045
• http://www.gov.ie/en/pdf-viewer/?file=https://s3-eu-west-1.amazonaws.com/govieassets/18/5569359-NDP%20strategy%202018-2027_WEB.pdf#page=76  

So lets look at some simple sums, not a strong point of our glorious rulers, but relevant for plans which are meaningful and don't end up as an awful mess. To put the above into perspective, the CSO figures tell us that we have some 2 million cars in this so called 'Republic'. I accept that if one has enough money to buy a top range Tesla, one gets a 100 kWh battery pack, which on a good day can do something close to 400 km. This is what one is entitled to expect from what is a 'car' after all. However, the problem is when one needs to recharge it, as a domestic house is typically only set up for 7 kWh. So if you turn off all your other electrical appliances and wait 14 hours, you'll be ready to go again. Not very practical is it?

However, not to despair as they are going to build out new charging infrastructure for us instead. Well that 100 kWh battery may theoretically be 'supercharged' in something like 30 minutes, but let's assume that such a charging point can charge three such Teslas in an hour. This means that it has to deliver 300 kWh in an hour equivalent to 0.3 MW. So if we build a thousand of these, we then need a 300 MW power station to supply them. By international standards, this is a medium sized power station, which would be comfortably able to cover 10% of the average demand currently on the Irish grid. 

So in simple terms if you want to be able to charge 3,000 electric cars in an hour, which is only 0.15% of the number of cars out there, you need a new 300 MW power plant, which is a large enough to cover 10% of the current country's demand. It's pretty obvious that unless you string up the country with new power stations and pylons, none of this is going to work, unless the public is prepared to spend a lot of their hard earned cash on electrical vehicles, which they will just have to park most of the time, as they don't have the hours to stand in line, awaiting an opportunity to get a charge in at one of these new 'charging infrastructures'. 

This is actually some pretty basis stuff and you would think that before they go off announcing their grandiose plans, they would have thought about it first. After all the data is published and readily available, such as from the SEAI's annual publications:

http://www.seai.ie/resources/publications/Energy-in-Ireland-1990-2015.pdf 

Transport uses some 42% of energy consumed in Ireland, more than double that which goes into electricity generation. If that energy demand is to be switched from fossil fueled vehicles to electric vehicles, then the electricity infrastructure we have would need to be more than doubled, even allowing for the fact, that the current grid is somewhat lightly loaded at night. Think about this one, you get an allocated slot to drive your Tesla to the new charging infrastructure to hook it up between 2.30 and 3.00 am - is this progress?.

And what of the alleged CO2 savings ? 

• An electric car with a 100kWh battery has thus emitted 15-20 tons of carbon dioxide even before the vehicle ignition is turned on. This calculation assumes a 50-70 per cent fossil share in the electricity mix. 
• https://www.ivl.se/english/startpage/top-menu/pressroom/press-releases/press-releases---arkiv/2017-06-21-new-report-highlights-climate-footprint-of-electric-car-battery-production.html 

If you were to buy a Fiat Punto, which does 120 g of CO2 per km, you could drive it for nearly 170,000 km before you would have emitted the same 20 tonnes of carbon dioxide. 

When one does simple sums, none of this makes the slightest sense, not least as to the why? We don't have an urban air pollution problem in our cities and the weather is just doing its own thing, claims of weather doomsdays are just wild speculation and with each increasing year it is clearly obvious how wildly speculative those claims are. So in essence electric vehicles are a trendy solution to a problem, which has never been assessed and quantified and actually doesn't currently exist. So why do we end up with this dysfunctionality? After all the Government's own procedures highlight:

• Regulations and their implementation often result in considerable costs to the public service, to citizens and to businesses. It is important that these costs are taken into account.  Regulatory Impact Assessment (RIA) is a tool to assess the likely effects of a proposed new regulation and involves a detailed analysis to:
• (i) ascertain whether or not the new regulation would have the desired impact and
• (ii) to identify the costs and benefits associated with the regulation.

Can't find a Regulatory Impact Analysis for this Project Ireland 2040 and above announced regulatory changes with respect to vehicles in Ireland. However, there was a Strategic Environmental Assessment completed for this Project Ireland 2040, but there is no assessment in it at all with respect to what has now been adopted above with regard to electric vehicles:

• http://npf.ie/wp-content/uploads/2017/09/Environmental-Report-%E2%80%93-Ireland-2040.pdf 

Theoretically the Lisbon Treaty, which we voted for, states in its Article 3 that we have a  right to a "highly competitive social market economy". As far as I'm concerned, what car I choose to buy is my business and why should I be dictated to by some barmy ideological politician? I would also recommend that one spend some time talking to older Eastern Europeans about the 45 years they spent behind the Iron Curtain and subject to the rigours of a planned economy there. This whole proposal is an outrageous abuse. It is not the State's entitlement or function to intervene in the free market in this manner, not least as it doesn't have a single scrap of analysis to justify the position it has now adopted. 

After all oil in 2014 was $110 a barrel and due to the technology advances brought on by fracking, has reduced to a value consistently around $55. While we have not seen all of that benefit, due to the degree of tax on these fuels, we have seen quite a benefit due to the market forces, which control supply and demand of this energy source. On the other hand, the electricity market in Europe is totally distorted by political intervention, costs have soared out of control and we saw how recently Viridian with two perfectly good power stations in Dublin simply decided to walk away from them, as the electricity market place is such a distorted mess here. So why on earth would anybody in their right mind want to be forced by the State to buy a vehicle, for which the facilities to refuel it are completely inadequate and the fuel supply is from a completely distorted market place lacking in transparency and demonstrating no shortage of political interference? In other words cronyism and a lack of accountability, which is breeding corruption.  

Emissions Rise at Ireland's Power Stations Despite €6 Billion Investment in Wind Energy

One of the things consistently pointed out on this blog is that no matter how much wind energy you deploy, you can never shutdown a single power station. Those who advocate for more wind are slowly realizing this as more facts come out. 

Last year (2016), electricity demand in Ireland rose by about 2.3%.  An additional 600MW of wind was added to the system but the capacity factor (a measure of the annual output from wind farms) fell from 33% to 27%. Also during 2016 the limit on the amount of wind allowed into the system at any one time (non synchronous penetration) was raised from 50% to 55% and then at the end of the year to 60%. 

According to reports by the EPA, emissions and fuel consumption increased in eight out of the eleven power stations for which records were available for 2016. 

Six of these power stations were operated by gas, the other three by oil. Poolbeg (gas), Tarbert (oil) and North Wall (gas) power stations had the largest rises in emissions. Aghada (gas) and Tarbert (oil) power stations had the highest emissions since 2011, while Rhode power station (oil) had the highest since 2007.

Power station	Emissions Increase 2016 Vs 2015	Highest Emissions Since	Fuel Type
Aghada	72%	2011	Gas
Huntstown 2	19%	2013	Gas
Poolbeg	366%	2014	Gas
North Wall	249%	2013	Gas
Great Island	61%	Commissioned in 2015	Gas
Tynagh	70%	2014	Gas
Tawnaghmore	14%	2010	Light Fuel Oil
Tarbert	240%	2011	Heavy Fuel Oil / Light Fuel Oil
Rhode	93%	2007	Light Fuel Oil

Note the three oil run power stations at the bottom all had the highest emissions for many years.

Factors that lead to these increases were :

• The interconnector to the UK was out for four months at the end of 2016. This would partly explain the increases in Dublin power stations such as Poolbeg and North Wall.

• Electricity demand increasing by 2.3%. With new data centres on the way, demand will soon increase by much more than that. 

• Capacity Factor of wind dropping from 33% to 27%. It's an unfortunate fact that no matter how many wind farms there are, if there is no wind, you get no energy. Storage wont fix this problem either as the original energy source is still intermittent wind energy that can remain flat for months on end during periods of high pressure.

• The low price of oil and gas. 

• The low capacity credit of wind energy. Ireland now has 3,000MW of wind, but all these wind turbines cannot replace a single power station. All the power stations must remain on standby. An additional 600MW of wind was added in 2016, roughly a 25% increase on 2015. The only solution for this is nuclear. A nuclear power station can fully replace an existing power station and hence achieves much greater and much more consistent fuel and emissions savings in the long run than wind ever can.

How ironic that Ireland is now dependent on oil again for it's electricity needs after spending close to €6 billion on wind technology and another billion or two on grid upgrades to accommodate this wind. If this is not an indictment of the wind program, then I don't know what is.

Sources :

1) EPA Environmental Reports

http://www.epa.ie/terminalfour/ippc/index.jsp

2) Eirgrid Renewable Energy Curtailment Report 2016

http://www.eirgridgroup.com/site-files/library/EirGrid/Annual-Renewable-Constraint-and-Curtailment-Report-2016-v1.0.pdf

3) Cost of wind is estimated to be €2 million per MW installed.  

Factcheck Energy Minister

Richard Boyd Barrett, one of the most capable politicians in the country, gave Energy Minister Denis Naughten a grilling in the Dail on Tuesday over his energy plans.  Barrett claimed that wind energy gets 80% of the PSO. The Minister disagreed but didnt have the figures to hand.

FACTCHECK : Wind gets about 67% of the PSO, peat gets 29% with the remaining 4% going to other renewables*.  

FACTCHECK : There is a legal process for assessing plans and programmes. It is not up to Deputy Dooley or Naughten to decide what route we should go down. A Cost Benefit Analysis needs to underpin this type of decision making where billions are at stake, not what Deputy Dooley happens to think is a good idea.

FACTCHECK : It is true that the wind energy guidelines are subject to strategic environmental assessment (SEA). However, an SEA is required for all public plans and programmes. The Government's Renewable Energy Plan (NREAP) has never been subject to an SEA. 

FACTCHECK : The 3-4% savings figure from wind is an overall emissions figure that includes other sectors like transport, heating and agriculture. Last year, there was a 4.9% increase in energy use. Transport's share of overall energy use rose from 33% to 42% in 2015.  So the savings made from installing wind farms are being more than wiped out by rises in other sectors. Yet the political and (Fake) News narrative is still all about electricity generation. 

*I have taken out the clawbacks from security of supply (gas) as they distort the PSO figure. Biomas, biogas and hydro made up about 5% of electricity generation in 2015 according to SEAI.   This means that wind received € 286 million from PSO.  

Ireland's Defunct Energy Plans - Rising Greenhouse Emissions and Energy Prices

Government is organized opinion.

The politician's promises of yesterday are the taxes of today.

                                                           - William McKenzie King 

According to the European Commission, Ireland is one of just eight EU countries to have increased it's greenhouse gas emissions between 1990 and 2012 :

This is despite the fact that we have replaced most of our oil power stations with gas and installed 1,4oo wind turbines.  There is a small reduction since 2009 but this is obviously more to do with the recession than renewable energy. 

The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) are now getting worried :

• • Ireland is unlikely to meet 2020 EU greenhouse gas emission targets for sectors including  agriculture, transport, residential, commercial, non-energy intensive industry and waste;
• 
  
• • Ireland’s emission reduction target is 20% below 2005 levels by 2020: EPA projections indicate that emissions will be 6 - 11% below 2005 levels by 2020;
• 
  
• • Agriculture and transport are projected to account for over three-quarters of Ireland’s non-Emissions Trading Scheme emissions in 2020:  agriculture (47%), transport (29%);
• 
  
• • Current and planned policies and measures are not sufficient to meet the 2020 targets.

Of course, if you prepare to fail, you fail to prepare. There are proper assessments which need to be undertaken before one could even contemplate taking on such a challenge. For example, the progressively lower capacity credit of wind energy means it can only have negligible impact on GHG emissions. 

But it gets worse. The government are now introducing a Renewable Heat Incentive to try to meet its 12% target for Renewable Heating but have failed to include households. They have cited cost as the reason. This is one of the initiatives that might actually have worked. But what they have in fact done is pushed up the cost of electricity for very small reductions in GHG emissions. Ireland now has the highest base cost of electricity in Europe (Eurostat) :

But we were told that all this wind energy would reduce the wholesale price. This is not happening either. So we have locked ourselves into expensive and ineffective policies for decades preventing money being spent on policies that could have worked. 

No CO2 emissions savings since 2011

Data from Eirgrid shows average CO2 levels haven't changed despite new wind capacity

Eirgrid publish CO2 emissions and CO2 intensity levels every quarter hour for the Irish system. When the data is extracted for the last three years, the results show, that on average, there has been no reduction in CO2 emissions from electricity generation. As can be seen in the first graph below, about 290MW of installed wind capacity was added to the system between 2011 and 2013. The capacity factor of wind (a higher percentage means higher winds), dropped in 2012 but by 2013 was back up to 31%. Demand remained relatively static, if anything we should be seeing a slight drop in CO2 emissions in line with the slight reduction in peak demand.

So with the extra wind capacity in the system and good wind speeds in 2013, we should have seen a drop in the average CO2 for the year when compared to 2011. Instead, we are back where we began in 2011. This would tend to indicate, as Colm McCarthy and ESB have recently stated, that we have reached saturation point with wind energy :

We can see that there was a slight increase in CO2 emissions in 2012, which could be attributed to the drop in the capacity factor of wind but more likely due to a change in fuel mix [see note below]. But for 2011 and 2013, CO2 intensity levels at every range - peak, low and average are almost identical despite the additional energy from wind.

These CO2 figures are also a good indication of fossil fuel used in electricity generation. So are the figures for fossil fuel savings claimed by the Irish authorities real or illusory ? Do they only exist in computer models ? The problem, as explained in an earlier blog, is that an additional MW of wind added to the system, does not always result in the replacement of a MW from conventional sources. The more wind that is added to the system, the more inefficient the use of fossil fuel generators. Running them inefficiently results in more fossil fuel use, and hence more CO2 emissions. In 2013, this problem resulted in the offset of the benefits from the additional "clean" wind energy let into the system. 

This means that if the plans for the doubling of wind capacity go ahead, we could actually see the reversal in the downward trend of CO2 emissions in the coming years.