Peak Winter Demand Arrives

Things get a little bit shaky !

 Last night at 5.30pm, the electricity grid hit peak demand for All Ireland at 6,638MW - not far off Record peak demand of 6,878MW reached on December 21st last year.

.

But total system generation was only 6,106MW leaving a shortfall of 532MW.  

Wind energy was low most of the day, only 380MW or about 7% was available for the whole island at 5.30pm.

The two UK interconnectors saved the day with combined imports of 450MW. There was still a shortfall of about 80MW, made up presumably from demand side units. These would comprise mostly of diesel generators and combined heat and power units. These units are "non-centrally monitored" according to Eirgrid and are not included in these graphs.  

Of course, that damned Brexit lot across the sea with their dastardly nuclear power charged us handsomely for the imported power, at € 2,000 a MW. 

To give some credit to the Irish grid operators, they were correct to build the East West interconnector as it is making up for the once efficient gas plant that have been prematurely wrecked from backing up the wind. One just hopes that the UK will have sufficient power to give us on those cold winter nights over the next few months. 

Precarious Winter Outlook

According to the Eirgrid Winter Outlook, the Irish electricity system will be operating at twice the level of acceptable risk this winter. The system is expected to enter the Alert State at times of low wind, low interconnector imports and low temperatures. No mention is made of Huntstown or Whitegate power stations. Are they assumed to return as expected? We are not told [update: it appears that Huntstown will be back later this week]. 

There are a number of engineering realities that are laid bare in the report that are a sobering read and at odds with the endless spin that has been published in the past in the media about green energy. 

•  Only 9% of total wind energy capacity is deemed as reliable or can be relied upon. 

•  Forced outage rates (the rate at which power stations are breaking down) have increased by 5 times over the past 5 years. This would appear to indicate that these power stations cannot cope with higher levels of intermittent wind energy.

•  Some CCGT (gas) plant is scheduled to be unavailable for 5-6 weeks of the winter period because of scheduled maintenance. This will be in November and early March. There is no guarantee that wind energy will be available during these weeks and, hence, the highest risk of blackouts will occur during these periods. This proves that wind energy cannot replace, nor is it equivalent to, a power station. 

There is also another factor which does not seem to be included in this report. Wind farms, like power stations, also need maintenance - in particular, the older fleet. Whilst it is unlikely that a significant amount of them would break down at the same time, sourcing replacement parts may take more time than normal in the present supply chain crisis. 

This is the first time that Eirgrid have published a winter outlook that warns of a high risk of blackouts. Last year, they were concerned about a trend of "increasing demand, dispatchable generation exiting the market and increasing generator forced outage rates". 

They were correct, that trend has continued into this year. Did anyone listen or take note ? Of course not. But then Eirgrid's own chief, Mark Foley, dismissed concerns about blackouts, saying  people can sleep soundly in their beds this winter.  

We must trust the plan. 

Coal and Oil to the Rescue During Cold Weather

Last week was one of the coldest spells of weather here in Ireland of recent years. As usual with very cold periods, wind generation was low. The grid operators struggled to keep the lights on and many amber alerts were issued.

Wind energy contributed about 20% of the power on average. 

Whitegate Gas power station was and still is out of action which is surprising for a modern ten year old power station. Gas power still provided the majority of the power in the grid mix -  around 50%. 

Wind energy last week - only a small portion of the total installed wind capacity of 4,000MW was available at times

 

Coal provided 12% despite only two out of the three generators at Moneypoint functioning.

An internal ESB memo shows that national grid operator, Eirgrid, asked the company to start up one of its three generators at Moneypoint in Co Clare, which had been shut down, to avoid any possible risk of blackouts [Eirgrid].

Starting up a coal generator takes at least 16 hours to start up from scratch (cold start) so presumably this unit was kept ticking over (warm start). This is what many wind advocates do not understand - you simply cannot switch off a large power station and expect to turn it back on again at short notice. 

Imports were only 1% presumably because UK had no surplus electricity of their own.

This then leaves "Other" at 10%. 

There are only two possibilities for what this comprises now that all but one of the three peat power stations have been discontinued - waste to energy and oil/diesel. Only one waste to energy plant is currently in operation at 62MW. So assuming it was running at max output it was providing about 1.5% of the total fuel mix. Edenderry peat power station now operates at about 60MW also (the other half of it's fuel source is biomass) so likewise about 1.5%. Therefore, unless I'm missing something, about 7% of the fuel mix came from oil and diesel generators. 

Which is roughly the portion of fuel mix from the two peat power stations that were closed down. Oil generation has not contributed this much since the 2000s. This amounts to an indictment of the renewable energy program, in that 4,000MW of new wind energy installed cannot replace 230MW of peat.

Based on that, the expectation that Moneypoint coal power station will close down by 2025 is now looking very unlikely.

Have A Green Green Christmas !

 Blackouts on the Way ?

Val Martin reports on what we predicted many years ago would happen as unreliable wind energy became a major energy source in the grid:

There are a number of unusual events occurring at the same time this winter :

• On the 10th December, peak demand exceeded that of 2010:

• Two peat power stations have been closed down by the Greens, a loss of 228MW
• Whitegate power station is offline due to a forced outage, a loss of 440MW
• Indaver waste to energy plant is offline due to a forced outage, a loss of 17MW
• The forced outage rates has increased every year for the past four years, which tends to support the theory that higher levels of wind energy leads to excessive cycling and ramping of generators which they were not designed for.
• Increased reliance on UK interconnectors, a country that has trouble itself with keeping the lights on.
• the all-island winter capacity margin has reduced every year over the past five years mainly due to increasing demand, dispatchable generation exiting the market and increasing generator forced outage rates. The capacity margin is the spare capacity available to meet peak demand. It is now at its lowest in recent times :

Source: Eirgrid Winter Outook

March in Ireland is Becoming Colder

Latest temperature data from Met Eireann shows that March is becoming colder in Ireland when temperature records from the past four years are compared with the long term average.  This will mean longer winters as we have had in 2020 and later growing seasons.

In 2016, the EU warned that :

A warming of the climate is expected to result in an earlier start of the growing season in spring and a longer duration in autumn. The date of the last frost in spring is projected to advance by about 5–10 days by 2030 and by 10–15 days by 2050 throughout most of Europe  

Which shows how hard it is to predict the future climate. We, here in Ireland, actually experienced the opposite, prolonged winters and delays to the start of the growing season.