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.

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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. 

EU Fossil Fuel Imports have Increased

Surprise, Surprise - The Renewables Program has Failed

One might expect that after installing all this renewable energy, that European Union countries would be importing less fuel. But the failure of their ideologically driven energy policies can now be understood by this simple graph. Gas imports are well up, and even oil and coal are slightly higher as compared to 2007. If the ultimate goal is to "divest" from fossil fuels , then we have got no further on. Perhaps it's time to do a proper cost benefit analysis before we go any further?

Ireland still as dependent on Energy Imports as in 2006

After 2,400MW of wind farm installations, one could be forgiven for thinking that Ireland might have reduced it's dependency on fossil fuels imports. When you dig through the SEAI reports, you will find that actually all we have done is reduced our import dependency by 1% - from 90% in 2006 when we had no wind energy whatsoever on the grid to 89% in 2013.

This is evidence that our power stations are still running all the time regardless of how much wind we have and the new interconnector from England has simply replaced a power station in Dublin (Huntstown) which itself was dependent on gas from UK. 

Memo to Alex White : the wind farms are not replacing power stations so why keep throwing away subsidies to them ?