Ireland warned it could face 'rolling blackouts' if it doesn't address data centres' demand for electricity Ireland could be facing frequent power cuts following a warning from the country's Commission for Regulation of Utilities (CRU) that data centres are having a "major impact on the Irish electricity system." Publishing a consultation paper earlier this week [PDF], the regulator said that the integrity of Ireland's power grid …
they just mean you don't have to turn them on as often
Which trashes the business case for the backup power stations. If they only generate electricity for part of the time, they only get a fraction of the revenue. The business case for installing renewables should include costs associated with the backup plans, but it doesn't as that would show up "green energy" for the racket that it is
The UK has 10,961 wind turbines with a total installed capacity of over 24.1 gigawatts. Yet last month they averaged 3.83GW and 5.89GW for the year to date. We were generating with coal most mornings and some early evenings too because the weather was cold and the wind so poor. The UK public is overwhelmingly in favor of wind power and almost totally ignorant of the fact that it's output can drop to very low levels for extended periods, and frequently has spells where the power its generating is close to insignificant e.g. at one point last week it dropped to 275MW i.e. 1.14% of its nameplate capacity.
Oh yes gas is our main source for electricity generation. Coal only gets used when gas is not enough. Look at to gridwatch.co.uk. It uses the same underlying data source but I find the presentation clearer, though templar is the site to go to to download the data.
This month coal usage is indeed zero, because its warm and demand is low, but look at last month. We were burning coal lots of times because it was cold and the wind was poor. The pattern was often morning and evening when the demand was still high and the solar power was low too at the edges of daylight. If you download from templar you will see the last coal use was on 28th May @20:40
It's also worth comparing the month and year charts. The energy intermittency gets somewhat hidden by squishing the horizontal scale.
Also note from the yearly charts that Solar power is really good in the UK summer, but really bad in the winter when the sun is low in the sky, the days are short and unfortunately demand for power is highest.
They don't end up in landfill - even the steel and aluminium in the larger components are worth too much in scrap value for that. The actual energy generating parts are easily recycled or reconditioned. The big problem, as pointed out by others, is that they're not a dependable source of power without some massive advancement in power storage tech.
Sorry I was not clear while most of the wind turbine are recycled the blades are not. Currently almost all of the blades go to landfill as it is seen as a affordable solution.
There is on going work use the blades in creating "greener cement, they used about 100 blades
https://www.utilitydive.com/news/ge-announces-first-us-wind-turbine-blade-recycling-program-with-veolia/591869/
The vast majority are still going to land fill . https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2020-02-05/wind-turbine-blades-can-t-be-recycled-so-they-re-piling-up-in-landfills
A better solution would be to replace the thermoset resin used in the blades with thermoplastic resin. Then you just just melt the resin and make new blades out of the old ones.https://earth911.com/eco-tech/are-recyclable-wind-turbine-blades-on-the-horizon/
I am all for greener energy but I do not want to replace one problem with another one later on.
Do we Need Nuclear Energy to Stop Climate Change? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EhAemz1v7dQ
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Two words - "tidal power", utterly predictable to within a minute for any location around our coast (see "tide tables"). Also completely hidden from view, unlike the wind turbines that now blight most of the sea view that I know that I am lucky to have - really miss that unbroken view of the horizon that I used to find so relaxing.
Then there's the storage issue - seems to me that the "lake at the top of a mountain" system which stores it as potential energy is a much "greener" solution than massive battery farms - wonder how the costs compare?
And, don't forget, the rolling blackouts will be limited to the private homes and domestic corporations who all pay an energy premium for attracting those foreign data centers. The data centers have, of course, negotiated priority and will be running 24/7/365 regardless.
If this is the truth then I have failed miserably at writing sarcasm. Well, sorry then. The lights will go out automatically with the coat. It is a blackout coat ;-)
And is of course on of the drivers behind the push to smart meters that will eventually see “time of use” tariffs heavily weighted to drive the poorer users off of the load at peak times.
The “lower” tariffs offered now to households with smart meters installed won’t survive past the stage that they finally force them on everyone and achieve the goal of ripping us off for lighting heating and cooking food at normal times.
Well it's not like the Irish government is all that keen on taxing these big IT corporations, is it? After all look at how they helped Apple dodge that €13bn tax bill imposed by the EU,
You can't build infrastructure without having the resources to do so. So this little problem is entirely down to the tax strategy of the Irish government.
I loved the place and the people when I was lucky enough to live there but someone has to see the error of their low tax ways, but as far as I can see no-one is prepared to stick their neck out on this.
But without the tax arrangements and 'accomodating' regulatory bodies nobody would have their HQ in Ireland.
All Ireland needs to do is work out some legal arrangement where the HQ, tax and data protection remain in a brass plaque at a post office on Craggy Island while the actual servers are in a bit barn in Germany with decent connectivity and power.
I don't think this is true: US companies like Ireland for a couple of reasons aside from the usual tax/workforce/cost issues: first, there is no language barrier, and second it's an hour closer (timezone-wise) than mainland Europe.
(There's also a third, which is customs pre-clearance; don't underestimate the value of having parts of Dublin -- and Shannon -- airports effectively inside the USA...).
Germany? Last place you'd want to place a heavy power user with reliability constraints. They have a lot of renewables so have very high power prices. Plus the other consequence: they are even more reliant on the interconnectors to less fauxgreen-silly countries than even the UK.
It seems that bitcoin mining consumes more electrical power than Argentina:
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-56012952
"Bitcoin uses more electricity annually than the whole of Argentina, analysis by Cambridge University suggests.
"Mining" for the cryptocurrency is power-hungry, involving heavy computer calculations to verify transactions.
Cambridge researchers say it consumes around 121.36 terawatt-hours (TWh) a year - and is unlikely to fall unless the value of the currency slumps."
An issue is generating all the power to feed these new technologies when we are supposed to be trying to save the ecosphere from global warming and pollution.
You get the planning permission to build the data center in 3 months, construction takes 6 months and it's ready in time for the ribbon cutting on all those new jobs just before the next election. The data center shuts 3 years later when the equipment is obsolete and somebody else offers a better tax deal.
Planning permission for the power station takes 10 years, it takes 5 years to build and 15 years to pay back the construction costs - even if the market for its power hadn't closed a decade earlier.
> Planning permission for the power station takes 10 years, it takes 5 years to build and 15 years to pay back the construction costs - even if the market for its power hadn't closed a decade earlier.
There's another "gotcha" down the line too.
You've built a bunch of power-stations to provide extra power for those D/Cs (25% of your load).
The companies behind the DCs start making noise about taxes being too high (despite IE's already bargain-basement rates). Do you
- Let them leave and swallow the cost of now having that surplus generation capacity that you're never going to need
- Give them a tax-break to keep them here, effectively delaying ROI for the power station subsidies?
I guess, though, Ireland might have a third option - we're also fucking up our own power strategy in the UK, so they could do like the French and sell us power
You have just described what capitalists like to label as socialism. The profits get taken by the already wealthy share holders or owners. Also absorbed into the people at the tops wages and bonuses. These people donate to government parties to ensure regulation isn't introduced to reduce profits and have the system running smoothly in the future and ultimately the tax payer picks up the bill.
Data centers don't have a good way to throttle their operations as the demand is external. With data privacy laws, they can't shift peak hour operations to a center where it's oh dark thirty and power demand is low.
There could be a requirement that DC's have solar panels fitted, but that's only slight fix since it can be extremely variable as with any "renewable" power source. Solar panels AND battery storage might become popular if tariffs are variable as well and can be expensive during peak hours.
It’s not so much of a tax issue as it is an inability to physically ramp up infrastructure fast enough to meet demand.
There are huge wind power projects in the pipeline but, it’s still an isolated grid in a small country with a population of 4.9 million (or 6.8 million if you include the all island aspect of the grid).
The distribution networks and grid are public utilities, but the generation capacity is provided purely commercially. So any extra power supply has to come from commercial providers in an open market, not the state or public money. The publicly owned ESB still owns a lot of generation capacity, but it operates as a commercial entity, just with public shareholding and there are other purely commercial generators.
The scale of the data centres has a limit and interconnection possibilities are limited by distance. There’s a UK - Irish connector, but the UK system is similarly quite tight for capacity and there’s a french interconnection due on stream in a couple of years.
There’ll have to be a limit on what can be added to the demand side or it will utterly sink the Irish grid and also fail to achieve green energy targets.
We’ve also seen the most inefficient (from a CO2 output and economic point of view) power plants removed from the grid here. So that’s also bringing supply tighter.
Ireland also operates a carbon tax regime, so carbon intensive power is significantly more expensive.
Some of the data centre operators are also directly financing windfarm development, on and off shore, which has a big positive impact, so does the increased demand for green energy as it’s driving up commercial investment in off shore wind which has the upside of driving down overall Irish CO2 emissions.
You also can’t just site data centres anywhere, as the population isn’t uniformly spread, so the grid infrastructure reflects that and there is MASSIVE opposition to new overhead lines in Ireland, so that will probably limit data centres to Dublin, Cork, Shannon Estuary etc.
We saw that happened when Apple tried to develop a large data centre in rural county Galway, it was mired in years of planning objections and they eventually gave up entirely.
So it’s not really just a case of tax / finances or lack of resources. There’s a cost/benefit analysis. A carbon footprint analysis and it’s constrained by Ireland’s isolated grid.
There are limits to what you can do in any grid, but an isolated one like here has a lot of constraints.
The regulator can also simply lodge planning objections to new projects or just refuse connection. If the supply isn’t there, it isn’t there. They’re not going to connect loads that can’t be reasonably supplied.
I see what you did there.
I agree, there's little or no chance of it getting a political go ahead, with the Green party being opposed on religous grounds but the problem is reputation not fact. Personally I'd be happy with three Thorium-Salt reactors replacing all generators, wind and wave farms on the island. The Dutch are doing good work on the design at NRG.
One huge problem with Nuclear is that to follow all the current international regulations it generally takes 20 years from the time that the OK is given to power being generated. The alternative is to remove most of the safety requirements to speed up deployment, and what kind of sane person would cut corners with critical infrastructure ?
The big advantage of wave/solar/wind is that they have much lower safety requirements, they can be in place with little more than standard planning permission. The big disadvantage, other than hydro power and tidal energy generation, is that their power output is unpredictable.
And no I'm not a nuclear is bad, green energy good type of person, both have advantages and major disadvantages. Pretty much any source of an energy differential has some downside, and typically lots of upsides.
Strap a string-on-a-stick to their foreheads & dangle a large denomination currency from the string just out of reach, then put them on a treadmill hooked up to a generator. That's Part 1.
Build a wind farm just outside their offices so that all their bluster keeps the turbines spinning energeticly. That's Part 2.
If you then build a methane collection facility to capture all the bovine excrement produced in said halls of power, that should do wonders to supply power to the masses. That's Part 3.
Why does it take the insane blind guy to see such obvious solutions? Sheesh! =-)p ((Sarcasm icon for the irony deficient))
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