The Minister for Energy and Climate has announced that Ireland will move to an auction system for renewables in 2019.
RESS been approved by Government and I will now seek EU State Aid approval. This Scheme will mark a shift from guaranteed fixed prices for renewable generators to a more market-oriented mechanism (auctions) where the cost of support will be determined by competitive bidding between renewable generators. The RESS is a critical step in bringing Ireland to a leadership role in relation to renewable energy, climate action, and energy efficiency. Communities are central to the design of the new Scheme and this will have a transformative impact on renewable energy projects right across the country.
Theoretically, this should lead to lower electricity prices but let's wait to see the finer details of how it will work. The Press Release mentions the importance of not locking in higher costs for consumers - surely the first time an Irish minister has acknowledged that the existing REFIT scheme led to higher electricity prices.
RESS auctions will be held at frequent intervals throughout the lifetime of the scheme. This will allow Ireland to take advantage of falling technology costs and by not auctioning all the required capacity at once, we will not be 'locking in' higher costs for consumers for the entirety of the scheme.
In the submission made by Irish Energy Blog to the consultation on the scheme (which can be read here), I outlined a scheme that would allow a low cost alternative to the fixed price REFIT scheme, which of course wasn't adopted, but I did warn about locking society into high energy costs :
This would ensure that our society is not locked into high energy costs for many years to come.
The proposed auction scheme still requires EU State Aid approval.
An Appeal Panel appointed by the Department of Communications has determined that the Energy Regulator (CRU) erred in making changes to the licence of Huntstown gas powered station following the power station's failure to secure capacity payments in the recent capacity auction. The Regulator's decision would have forced the power station to give three years notice of closure, which meant the plant would have had to run at a loss for those years.
"The CRU has effectively turned up the heat and locked the door of the kitchen.” - Appeal Panel decision
The Appeal Panel was made up of three barristers - Eilis Brennan BL, Joe Jeffers BL and Aoife Carroll BL. They ruled that the Regulator had made a “serious and significant error (by omission)” by not reaching a negotiated settlement to help manage the power station's exit from the market through a Targeted Contracting Mechanism (TCM). In a further blow to the already delayed I-SEM, the Regulator had failed to include a TCM in it's setup.
It's uncertain as to the consequences of this ruling and whether it will actually be implemented at all. However, it does highlight the urgent need for some independent oversight in Ireland.
I wrote previously about the capacity auction here.
by Owen Martin
A total of 544MW of demand side units (DSU) was contracted for in the recent All Island I-SEM capacity auction. Each DSU will qualify for capacity payments of € 41,800 per MW. So that's a total of €22 million that will be paid each year to encourage off grid generation, including "dirty" diesel generation, in my opinion, a consequence of the mad rush for wind energy. Since wind cannot always be depended on to meet demand, the obvious solution is to reduce demand.
A Demand Side Unit (DSU) is a demand site that can be instructed by EirGrid to reduce electricity demand. Instructions to reduce electricity demand are called dispatch instructions. Where a DSU consists of more than one individual demand site it is called an aggregated DSU. A DSU uses a combination of on-site generation and/or plant shutdown to deliver a demand reduction in response to an instruction from EirGrid [Eirgrid].
However such industrial sites can offer demand reduction services through a combination of
load reduction, running standby diesel generators, or running inactive Combined Heat and
Power (CHP) plant [Rationale for DSU].
Many data centres have installed diesel generators, so presumably they can also qualify as a Demand Side Unit, which will greatly reduce the load on the now wind dominated grid. In fact, we may soon see the entire industry of Ireland registering to become Demand Side Units which would greatly reduce electricity demand and thereby make it easier to meet our renewable targets. Although, in reality, it would be a fudge and would make a mockery of our "green" credentials as we would still be as dependent on fossil fuels as ever.
It is ironic that the mad rush for clean wind involves moving away from very efficient gas generation to inefficient fast acting forms of generation such as diesel. In fact, the capacity auctions saw DSU's take precedence over the very recently built modern and efficient CCGT in Huntstown, Dublin. So we have one policy which seems to prefer higher emitting generation in direct conflict with the other policies that encourage lower emitting generation.
It was no surprise then that recently it was announced that Ireland's carbon emissions were rising. This is because central planning is about box ticking and meeting targets rather than a sensible all round plan that can adapt and respond logically to feedback.
