Spirit of Ireland – do the numbers add up?
I have heard some of the hype about a proposed solution to all our energy (and economic) worries. My first reaction is to fire up the bullshit detector. Too often great publicity is given to fanciful schemes that hide more subtle attempts by people to dip their hands in the public purse. The guys that tout every few years for a multi million euro feasibility study on building a tunnel under the Irish sea which everyone knows will never be built are a good example. But I am an Engineer. I can do the maths on this scheme. So I can give a first estimate on whether it is a steaming heap of manure, or something that might have some promise.
The SoI guys quote a figure of 3500 MW generating capacity to be required from wind power. That number is enough to make a start on some calculations. Calculations that look at the feasibility of this is from a physics, and laws of nature stand point, before you ever get into things like the economics of the proposal, or the desirability of despoiling the mountains of the west with dams and massive construction projects.
MacKay and Hot Air
My handbook for the calculations is David MacKays “Sustainable Energy—Without the Hot Air“. He is a physicist in Cambridge University. Annoyed by people throwing numbers around about green solutions to energy problems he sat down and did some basic calculations to show what was and wasn’t possible. And then he wrote a book about his findings. To show how sincere he is about helping people understand this stuff, he has made the book freely available on his website withouthotair.com. He has several chapters on wind power, and uses Irish data (from Eirgrid) for much of his calculations.
Units
Now a note on units. 1MW is a MegaWatt or a million Watts, a typical unit of power generation or consumption. You will know Watts from light bulbs or microwave power. This is an instantaneous measure – how much electricity is consumed in a second. The ESB prefers to measure your electricity consumption in kWh or kilowatt hours. This is equivalent to 1 kilowatt (or 1000 watts) used for one hour. The same principle is applied to the national power consumption amount and generation capacity, just the units are larger. Typically people use GWh (gigawatt hours = 1,000,000,000 Watts for one hour) or MWh. To simplify things I will work in GWh and MWh per month.
To convert a MW rating then so you multiply the MW by 24 (hours in a day) and 30 (days in a month). So Moneypoint , a 915MW power station provides 658 GWh of power to Ireland per month. Is that clear? 
The Questions
SoI state that we will need 3,000MW of wind generated electricity capacity. And that that will require 1% of Irish land area to generate.
Based on their estimates of the scale of the project I want to know, do their numbers add up, is this technically possible, and how big a project are we looking at?
My starting numbers
- Current Irish power consumption from the CSO: about 2,500 MWh per month.
- Area of Ireland from Wikipedia: 81,638.1 km^2 (square kilometres).
- Average Irish wind speed, from Met Eireann: 7 m/s (from the chart on the top right of the linked page).
- Current land use in Ireland from the EPA: 1.9% artificial (including all urban development, transport infrastructure, landfill, etc.)
- Irish load factor for wind power from the Irish Wind Energy Association: 35% and I am being generous here as I assume that all the power is generated on the west coast. Note how similar the rest of their numbers seem to those quoted by SoI.
- I am using MacKay’s calculations for the amount of power that can theoretically be extracted from the wind [Part III - Technical Chapters, B Wind]. He derives the formula to power output for a wind farm related to wind speed. You can review his calculations yourself, but as a mechanical engineer I can tell you they look sound to me. He is very generous with his view of 50% efficiency from turbines.
Analysis
Well for starters the “current Irish power consumption is 2,500GWh per month. The SoI figure of 3,000MW is about 2,520GWh so they are planning to effectively double Irish electricity generation capacity. Can we get that much power from the wind?
I plugged a 7m/s average wind speed into MacKays formula and came up with an average power of 3.5W/m^2. You have to reduce that by the load factor of 35%, which gives you a net power of 1.23W/m^2.
Dividing that into the need to 3,000MW of power and you discover that the required wind farms will need 2,448km^2 of land. This is less than the Irish national land area, so I guess you can say that, yes, in theory we could generate enough power to run the country. The problem here is the size of the wind farms needed.
2,448km^2 is equivalent to 3.0% of the land area of the whole island, or 3.5% of the republic. For starters this means SoI’s figure of 1% is bullshit. But that 3.5% needs to be put into perspective. It is a tract of land greater than about the same size as (edited the typo) all of country Limerick (2,686km^2), covered with wind turbines. Today, a total of 1.9% of the country is “artificial” and has been built on. We are talking about taking pretty much the same amount of area again and covering it in wind turbines. Regardless of the cost of the hardware this is a massive undertaking that would totally change the entire western seaboard, even before you start to look at the economic cost of such a construction project.
And even then it isn’t sure that this would provide us with all the power we need. MacKay goes into the problems of intermittency in wind power at length in his book, using data from Ireland. This is the issue of the wind dropping, or just not being there when the power is needed. There are times when generating capacity drops to less than 2% because of light winds, sometimes for periods of up to 5 days. The SoI solution is pumped storage by damming glacial valleys. I haven’t gone into the calculations for that part of their solution yet. If I get a chance tomorrow night I will look at them.
The unspoken questions
In all of this I have not asked some very relevant questions. Would we want the western sea board, the most beautiful part of the country covered by thousands of square kilometers of wind turbines? And would we want the uplands there transformed by gigantic dams, lakes and power transmission infrastructure?
Don’t get me wrong. I am all for wind power, I do find wind turbines attractive. But the scale of what is being suggested here doesn’t seem to be grounded in reality at all. There will be a staggering price in terms in damage to our environment from building over more than 10% of the land of the 5 big western seaboard counties (Donegal, Mayo, Galway, Clare and Kerry). Even if the the turbines themselves were invisible just imagine the impact of service roads, transmission infrastructure, foundations and support structures? And there there would be the dams for the pumped storage facilities. Something I have not even got to looking at.
This scheme strikes me as an over the top think tank fantasy that has escaped out into the wild. What gives me hope, is that the whole scheme is so deranged that it will never be implemented. I just hope no-one in government decides that it might be a good idea to spend some real money looking into this crack pot idea.
Thanks for that, I was about to get sucked in there. Nothing like a cold shower of mathematics.
But to toy with it… the fundamental idea is that we have a lot of convenient valleys which could be cheaply converted into energy reservoirs, thereby fixing a key problem of wind energy: the supply variation.
Imagine for a moment that we could put all the windmills offshore where they wouldn’t bother anyone – or some other hand-waving solution to the logistics of the actual generation. The question then is whether we really could smooth out the difference between peak and trough supply by using these reservoirs.
If it was most of the west coast it would be unconscionable. But if it was just a couple of valleys, it would be a sacrifice worth making.
So, what volume of water represents the amount of energy we would need to cover the longest reasonably foreseeable absence of wind…?
And if you throw in other variable energy sources like solar and tidal, you… well you increase the difficulty of the maths. But you reduce the amount of necessary storage!
Well I won’t get a chance to do the storage calculations this evening. But I will go at them in the next few days.
That said, the current view is that dams have a considerable negative environmental impact by themselves.
And from years of mountaineering I can tell you that few enough of the valleys we have could be neatly dammed to make resevoirs. They would wither be pretty small or woudl require massive construction projects to actually contain significant volumes of water. Most of our uplands have been very well rounded by a succession of ice ages.
While I would agree that much normal dams to indeed have negative environmental, there is one difference which changes completely your argument,
When you are talking about damming up rivers, you alter many local micro eco systems of the river, surrounding lands, habitats, bio systems, and those dependant or living with what was there previous.
But, SOI, is not talking about damming up rivers, its about pumping sea up to man built dam (yes there will be some eco changes, but it is well worth it, think about expanding suburbia as something far destructive) then flowing it through sluices, generators or whatever back out to sea. So, I think the “harm” is minimal, in terms of local impact, BUT, on the other hand, on the eco side of things, going from 98% state dependance on mostly CO2 emitting sourced energy sources to this “green” energy source, is HUGE HUGE HUGE. Ireland has the chance to pave a new way in Europe and with that to become a truly “Green Isle”
Good man for doing the maths behind, ill be back later to learn more,
regards
Dunk
It doesn’t matter whether you dam a river, or artificially flood a whole valley. You are still innundating an existing eco-system. And in the SoI case the suggestion that salt water should be pumped into uplands with sensitive peat bio habitats is far more destructive than just letting a fresh water river accumulate behind a barrier.
Just because something is renewable doesn’t mean it is enviromentally friendly.
all construction, for the most part, radically alters eco systems, hence the expanding suburban city model cited above. But, we have to choose what changes are necessary and for what reasons.
I agree, as stated, that artificial dams filled with sea water will alter the local microsystem. BUT, in my opinion, they are far less destructive to damming up a river, which radically affects all things down stream, as well as affecting up damm´s micro climate etc.
Nature adapts, I think it can take these 2 damms. But more importantly, if it succeeds as much as SOI have outlined, that positive eco effecct negates the loss of peat etc and along with the CO2 from construction (am assumming tonnes of concrete will have to be poured).
Man has altered his environment for a long time, that has us in this mess in the first place (the eco state, global warming, peak oil etc…) BUT, we must imagine the best case scenario, given the complex situation we find our selves in globally, and with that implement it.
By the way just to add, I too am a hill walker, as well as community gardener, greenways bikeway advocate, eco activist, architect and eco urbanist, now living and working in Barcelona;
work: http://www.ecointelligentgrowth.net/eng/index.html
blog: http://itsafunnyoldworld.wordpress.com/
oiche mhaith
The Irish sea has convenient sand banks such as the Arklow bank for wind farms, but wind farms off the Western sea board would be a different story. Each windfarm may require a rock like the Fastnet to be anchored upon. Otherwise they have to go on land. I don’t have a problem with wind farms, I think they look great, but given the difficulties of local community action (think Corrib gas line) against mobile phone masts, there is sure to be public angst and outcry about the possibility of a blade from a windmill coming loose and flying into someone’s house, slaughtering all the occupants.
As for the question of rivers in Ireland and damming up valleys, not all valleys are located within National Parks and if some of the recently built, now ghost entities about to be gobbled up by NAMA (flood plain/valley ugly housing estates) could be flooded with fresh water, that could only be a good thing. It would be a win win situation. Some of the debt could be hidden under water! Hurrah! Win Win situation all round.
Spirit of Ireland is a really bad choice of name. It makes me think of yachts in round the world races. The website is also complete nonsense. Where is the technical data?
I forgot, your interpretation of a valley having to be up in the mountain isn’t necessarily what happens. Think Inniscarra and Ardnacrusha. Both on existing large rivers in low lying areas. Isn’t Ardnacrusha a canal rather than a flood like Inniscarra?
The power output of a hydro station is proportional to the water drop. We get away with Ardnacrusha’s relatively low drop (28.5m) because of the volume of water coming from the shannon. But it can still only produce a peak output of 85MW. To generate 3,000MW you would need 35 similar power stations. The other factor then is that you need to be able to buffer the power for a minimum of 5-7 days for periods of low wind. That will require vast water reservoirs. Calculations on that are to follow…
Well done to the Spirit of Ireland guys for having good ideas and the guts to put the ideas out for discussion.
Personally I’m not convinced that 2 pump storage lakes be able to sustain an average 3000 MW output for 4 or 5 days. The numbers don’t add up in my head.
But if we had the correct dimensioning of an interconnect with France we could import their non Co2 creating Nuclear Electricity during our slack times. Plus export our surplice during the windy days.
would engineering type solutions are the correct way to go.
Hi Michael, I seriously doubt it myself. I will check the numbers during the week to be sure.
And after that there are the questions about the costs of all this. And of course whether the plain people of Ireland want to see the west industrialised to this scale.
Lets get things into perspective here,first of all there is already over 1GW of installed wind turbines already in the country and nobody is tripping over them on a regular basis, you see a wind turbine actually occupies an area of about 100 square feet 10ftx10ft, although the area of undisturbed airspace needed for efficient operation may need to be a square kilometre, so when we talk about 3 per cent of our land area needed for turbines, we are really talking about AIRSPACE not GROUND SPACE. So this is do-able without destroying the country. a final point, a wind turbine does not destroy anything, it borrows the visual amenity for its lifetime of about 20yrs once its removed, its as if it was never there
Giller, right now the wind production capacity in Ireland is 1255MW, which according to the Irish Wind Energy Association represents 284GWh per month. So we would have to increase our current output by a factor of about 10.
Each turbine has a footprint considerably larger than 100sq ft. More like 50 square metres. Take a look at this page on the foundations for a 3MW turbine where they had a foundation diameter of 16.5 meters! Added to this there will be need for ancillary infarstructure like roads.
Using a 100m turbine diameter and a standard 5:1 seperation ratio that means there would have to be a turbine ever half km from Malin to Mizen and extending about 10 km inland.
Now while a wind farm will not use up all the land under it’s foot print I have not seen any cases of housing or other residential buildings being situated within wind farms before now.
Your comment about “borrowing the visual amenity” is a little silly as well. if this is meant to be a great scheme to guarantee Ireland’s energy independence then we would hardly be demolishing the whole thing in 20 years. It would be here to stay.
Personally I have no problems with wind farms, up to a point. I think the scale of what is suggested here is far too intrusive from a visual point of view.
But fram a practical standpoint it is so large a scheme that it will not get approval. It is just too big.
And that is before people start to look at the economics of it.
SK
You make valid points which need to be discussed and as the Spirit of Ireland initiative clearly states that the people of Ireland, not the Irish state, the people and communities, particularly the communities in which activity takes place, have to support and benefit FROM the proposal, in every facet of its incorporation into our society (ownership,social and economic benefits etc) I will address your points, but first let me preface, by stating that the spirit of ireland project is not about creating a bigger wind industry, it is much bigger this.
Your description of a corridor of wind farms all along the west coast is essentially correct, IF that was the proposal, it is NOT. The useful wind resource of Ireland extends over approx 60 per cent of the country and because the electrical grid includes Northern Ireland , the calculation has to extend there also, your figure on wind production at the moment is correct is correct, but that is not the same as installed wind capacity, many turbines are installed but not connected to the grid yet. The proposal is based on the valid need to provide mass electricity storage, which is a global need, as renewable power is intermittent and must be stored. The proposal is to build some pumped storage units, like turlough hill, using the sea as the lower reservoir and a coastal glacial valley as the higher reservoir. As the global consensus is to move away from fossil fuel and into reneweables, facilities like this are inescapable. Because wind power is the most developed of the renewable technologies, it is proposed that wind is used at first, to charge the reservoir, as other technologies mature, such as wave or tidal, they will probably replace wind, hence my reference to borrowing the visual amenity. Ireland is blessed not only with abundant wind energy, it has enormous reserves of tidal and wave power, constantly being renewed by the activities of the solar system, and the ball breaker, is that Irelands geology makes the construction of large scale storage as a function of our land mass, extremely economically viable. The construction of this infrastructure could provide from 50 to 100 thousand jobs for up 10 or 15 years, and the benefits will be enjoyed for generations of Irish people. And when the 1 or 2 or 3 or 4 reservoirs are built, you would have to look to find them, and when you do, you will find a lake, with not a smokestack in sight Think of the economic advantage the country would have to be an energy exporter as opposed to an importer, not to mention the possibility of being the centre of the global renewable industry.
This project is not big, IT IS HUGE and is very do-able. And will be owned by the Irish People as a CO OP. Have I persuaded you, even a little, not to prejudge the project until specific details are announced, which will not happen until the communities who will have to accept the “Lakes” are consulted and have accepted the proposal, lets have no more Corrib disasters.
Giller,
one of the things which annoys me most intensely about Spirit of Ireland is the utter inconsistency in the stuff they are coming out with.
YOu talk about the construction of the infrastructure providing 50-100 thousand jobs for up to 10-15 years. The project was initially supposed to be complete in 5 years.
The budget is currently somewhere between 10-11.4 billion euro depending which page of the website you read and who you ask. Someone has admitted to me that in fact, the budget figures are based on nothing other than headline ideas. This is not the basis for a large engineering project.
The number of hydro storage reservoirs is between 2 and 4 depending on whether you ask Padraig Howard or Igor Shvets.
The locations of the currently unknown number of wind turbines vary from all along the west coast to all over 60% of Ireland.
The question of financing costs has not been addressed at all.
The question of where the financing will come from has not clearly been addressed part from some intention to tap the National Pension Reserve Fund for some money and get special planning handling and permissions out of the Government.
The figures currently do not add up to the country being a net exporter of electricity.
The pumped storages are either like Turlough Hill or not like Turlough Hill depending whether Spirit of Ireland is trying to suggest that the idea is okay we already have it or the storage is adequate. If voices are raised about pump storage, it’s okay, we have it. If you point out the cost of constructing them, it’s not like Turlough Hill.
There are a bundle of questions about connection to the grid on the forum of the group which are still really clearly answered because Spirit of Ireland haven’t made key critical engineering decisions and when you try to get further details on them, you get told “we have to consult the local communities first”. This is a cop out of a situation.
You are asking Sliabh not to prejudge the project until specific details are announed. I am asking you to do the same from the other side. Frankly there is a lot of unquestioning acceptance of how brilliant this would be from some parties without any straight figures coming out of the Spirit of Ireland camp.
You also seem to forget that for all their faults, the Irish State and the Irish People are effectively one and the government represents the people. As for the co-op ownership idea, I grew up in a farming community. Ask yourself why there are few creamery coops left in the country, would you?
As I said before I don’t really think this wind +pump storage = Nirvana equation adds up. However I’m delighted that the Spirit of Ireland guys had the guts to put their heads above the parapets in starting this discussion.
The country needs a big vision and lots of energetic people to bring the country back from its collective depression.
E-mail just in:
The Institute of Engineers are hosting “an open forum session” on Tuesday 23rd June in Clyde Road, from 9:00am to 1:00pm.
This could be a good chance to see if there is merit in this proposal.
Giller,
As Teresa has said to look at this project numbers are needed. SoI are not providing them. I have come up with some of my own, but to be frank these days I am a telecoms specialist.
I do know people who are in the wind and renewables industry mind you. And they are telling me that this is fantasy, in terms of scale, cost and feasibility.
Even without seeign their numbers I am inclined to agree with them, as if this were as abvious and straight-forward (and based on existing off the shelf concepts/technology) as the SoI people claim then why has it not been suggested before now?
Hi there,
Regarding Mackays formula, you will notice that the power per unit area is based on a machine with a 32m hub height and rotor diameter of 25m metres. These dimensions are totally out of date. So best not to use that formula.
On the west coast of Ireland, the most suitable turbines would be 3MW machines, 80m hub, 90m rotor diameter. This is the turbine SoI have used in their calculations, see the questions section of their website.
An easy way to calculate the average power output per turbine is to assume a capacity factor (say 33% here, realistic based on west Ireland’s wind resource) and multiply the rated capacity of the machine by this. Here we would get an average output of 1MW.
SoI reckon we need 2,500 of these turbines to achieve their goals, which I agree with. This would give us an average power output of 2,500 MW.
Regarding the land area required, the most realistic way to look at this is to base it on an existing wind farm that utilises these turbines. The Clyde wind farm in Scotland is soon to be built and will incorporate 150 of these turbines. The total land area of the development is almost 50 km2 (from their website). Therefore we would require 830 km2 to install 2,500 of these machines. This is almost exactly equal to 1% of Irelands land area. Put another way, we just need to build 17 Clyde wind farms. (17*150=2500). The wind generation aspect of their proposal is absolutely feasible. Apologies for the rounding errors.
James, McKays formula is not based on a rot diameter, instead it takes a measurement of wind energy available per m^2 of ground. As he points out himself, a bigger turbine will increase this, but then you need to increase the spacing and the two factors cancel out.
Ordinarily you could go with existing wind farms for an extimate of land requirements, but you need to make sure you are comparing apples with apples. To be sure oif the Clyde one is comporabel we would need to know what the local average wind speed is.
As an aside, when I was out west over the June bank holiday weekend I was looking up at the many wind farms there today. It reminded me that it is not enough to just say we need x square kilometers of land. It needs to be suitalbe land too. The reality is that these things cannot be built over people’s houses. And this will severly limit the available land.
Enjoying the debate so far. Thanks James for the info on land area requirements; glad to see that the 1% estimate by SOI might be correct.
The SOI have said that 32 square kMs will be required for storage; at an average depth of 10m, a head height of 100m and a round trip efficiency of 84% then only 73GWh of electricity can be provided by the storage reservoirs. Therefore in periods of peak demand when wind speed is minimal the storage reservoirs will only provide a days electricity demand. I wonder if the SOI’s definition of energy independence is to import a % of our electricity in times of peak demand (winter) and during the remainder of the year supply a surplus to europe equal to or greater than what we import in peak demand periods so that the annual quantity of electricity we produce is equal to or greater than the quantity we consume. It isn’t really energy dependence is it if we still need to rely on imports! Anyway I welcome the idea and I hope that it proves to be feasible.
I was just reading a document from the SOI website (see the following http://www.spiritofireland.org/content/repository/discussion_on_energy_from_hydro_and_wind_110609.pdf)
They express the view that two storage reservoirs of area 4km2 each would be sufficient to store 200GWh of electricity which would be a few days electricity demand. However an average depth of approximately 90m would be needed to store the volume of water required to store 200GWh of potential energy. Obviously my estimate of a 10m deep valley above is under estimated? Is anyone familiar with the valleys on the West Coast? Are there such large, deep uninhabited valleys?
There are so many bizarre claims in SoI’s analysis, it is hard to know where to start. Every number I checked has turned out to be either flat wrong or hopelessly optimistic.
e.g. the claim that only 1% of the land area gets covered in turbines is based on an unrealistic power intensity of 4.3MW/km2. A realistic number for large 2D 3MW turbine arrays is 2.5MW/km2 or lower. You can easily double their land area estimate. In addition, Eigrid data show that capacity factors have fallen below 30%, because the best on-shore sites have already been taken. I could go on.
The most bizarre claim by SoI though is their cost of pumped storage. SoI claim that they will be able to store electricity at a tiny fraction of the cost of pumped storage built anywhere else (per GWh). I fail to see where their incredible competitive advantage is. In fact use of seawater may push up costs, as extreme measures need to be taken to prevent large-scale salinisation of ground-water.
An unsettling aspect of SoI is that they clearly have no interest in economics, but do have a deep interest in subverting existing environmental law. Graham O’Donnell claims to have four barristers working on “planning issues”. This can only mean working around the requirements for proper environmental impact assessments. Irish taxpayers have already paid fines and expensive legal bills for breaches of environmental law by wind energy vested interests in the past. Does he want us to do this again?
Over-investment in wind is draining funds from other, much more promising, renewable technologies. e.g. Ireland is a small island with a fantastic and under-rated tidal resource. Tidal systems can be built off-shore in lagoons which could provide both power and storage in a single environmentally friendly unit. There are several suitable sites on the east coast, close to centres of population and away from sensitive tourist areas.
Surely these can be exploited at much lower cost (certainly environmental, and very likely financial) that SoI’s daft scheme?
“Spirit if Ireland” sounds like a new religious cult. And indeed they seem quite intent on peddling their own brand of eternal salvation.
Even Denmark (which manufactures a huge percentage of turbines used worldwide) is not permitting massive 3MW machines because of widespread opposition
Also the Danish government has recently decided to compensate local people who live near large turbines for loss of amenity. Will the Irish government offer the same compensation here ?
Wind farms are divisive. This project would inevitably lead to bitter divisions in communities as some landowners seek to cash in at the expense of neighbour’s amenity.
The SOI proposal has some merit in that it underlines the gaping flaws in the current Government’s naive plans for wind energy, eg No provision for storage ( too expensive) and handing over our beautiful landscape to private companies.
Wind may be free but our landscape is priceless.No-one appears to be putting a value on it at the moment. Where are our heritage bodies ?
Hello all
I am gratified to see that so many people have enough interest in the proposal that they have bothered to post on it. Spirit of Ireland is not a cult, everyone is a hard headed professional working to fix the problems of renewable energy, there have been many interactions with stake holders in the west and nationally and it is our intention to continue with this process of consultation as it has improved the proposal to a huge extent.
Our figures have been checked and re checked and so far still stand up,
James has brought up the necessity of a national energy policy, and in this regard the potential of renewable energy providing a stable for a decade electricity price, in an era of price instability and the real possibility that we have reached a peak oil scenario, should not be ignored.
I remain at the service of anyone with queries at patgill@spiritofireland.org
Giller, you said:
“Our figures have been checked and re checked and so far still stand up”
Now unless I missed something in the last few weeks, you guys have still not released hard numbers on your proposal, and any calculations done by experts in the relevent fields say – No, your numbers do not add up.
“bg” I advise you to read “An Analysis of the Potential Economic Benefits of Developing Ocean Energy in Ireland which was published in 2005 by Peter Bacon and ESBI which concluded “In the case of Tidal Energy, the projected costs do not auger well for barrage type projects on the Irish coast and this technology should not be pursued”
It is amazing how you can state a claim regarding Ireland’s tidal energy resource without substantiating it. The fact is that there are a very limited number of sites in the world which have a sufficient tidal range (Bay of Fundy, Severn Estuary). One site in Waterford was investigated by researchers in UCC but it was deemed unsuitable due to ecological issues.
Perhaps you meant Wave Energy which suffers from exactly the same intermittency issues as wind and hence will require storage, which the SoI proposal can provide.
What if the state introduces a carbon tax. In Sweden the tax is 108€/tonne produced. Maybe then people could take the Spirit of Ireland proposal seriously then. Also under the EU’s Emission Trading Scheme Ireland can sell CO2 credits due to avoided CO2 in electricity generation to other countries that are not reaching their targets.
Brilliant idea!! Work out the details and get the people on board!!
Nice idea but show me numbers and thousands of jobs doing what where and most importantly when
spirit of ireland is a great idea that must go ahead as soon as possible,all the talk of loss of habitat is a n unfortunate side effect of the world we live in today these lakes have a total area of 1,280 acres each,our biggest fresh water lake is lough corrib 44,000 acres so these would be insignificant by comparison. would these same people be happy with intermittent power supply 10-20 years down the line when oil and gas become more scarce and a barrel of oil hits $500 because thats whats coming, we have to make sacrifices now so we dont suffer in the future.
David, its a stupid idea. It sounds nice, but any expert that has looked at it (you know renewable energy experts, economists and engineers) say these guys are talking shite. Any they STILL have to produce the detailed numbers we have been promised for about a year now. This is bunk.
This is a great future project for Ireland, why all this begrudging? The representatives behind this projects are specialist’s in different area’s and clearly have displayed they are competent to implement this proposed strategy,this could possibly be one of the element’s to help get Ireland get back to moving economy.
SK So far what(renewable energy experts, economists and engineers)said that it was’nt a good idea?????? we should be supporting a project like this not bringing it down. I think its a great idea.
forget the so called “experts” its these masters and degree owning clowns that have this country in the infastructural and economic mess its in today. these guys have a brilliant idea and thats what it is at the moment they say that themselfs,they need more info on costs land use etc. but at least there looking to the future,it may not be perfect but it isnt a stupid idea either, far from it,im sure with some tweaks and refinement it will work and we will look back on this project as a monumental moment in irish history.ps your excused for your unfortunate use of language and by the way its Derek.
Derek, apologies for getting the name wrong. Your comment on experts falls into the category of “not even wrong“, and in the normal course of events would automatically disqualify you from the argument (apart from having the philosophical discussion about how you determine if anyone is right after you automatically dismiss any informed opinions on a technical subject as being worthless as they are from “experts”). But to humuor you, I shall point out that just because some people who described themselves are “experts” in a field which everyone admits is more art than science, managed to pull a fast one which trashed the world’s financial system, that doesn’t change the fact that real experts, like engineers, scientists, and people who can do simple business cases (like cash in should equal or be greater than cash out to make something viable) have looked at SOI and found it to be severly lacking. Their costings don’t work, their techical assumptions are grossly optimistic, and they are basing their scheme on technology that in some cases doesn’t exist, and it others has never been run at this sort of scale before anywhere.
Ironically SOI have more in common with the financial frauds than anyone else.
oh i see when somebody disagrees with your point of view they get the boot,that makes sense to you im sure but not to me i thought this was a discussion not an arguement,you contradict yourself by saying its a stupid idea yet at the top of your page where you do the analysis yourself you say “yes in theory we could generate enough power to run the country” so the idea is far from stupid, your problem seems to be the size of the wind farms and reservoirs needed to achieve the power and the damage done to the landscape, maybe it will spiol certain views on the west coast,this is a small price to pay for energy independance.and on the cost soi can only estimate noboby would have that info until completion you know how things work in ireland double the time and price and you have your answer.lets not get hysterical here “financial fraud”is a bit ott dont you think.
Derek, I am not giving you the boot. You are free to make your argument here and to continue to post comments. (though I do prefer to see some effort at spelling, punctuation, and capitalisation).
Pretty much anything is possible “in theory”, but in practice you run into political, technical, economic, political, envriomental obstacles. The reality is that the idea SOI have proposed is about as likely to deliver energy independence to Ireland as fusion power – another one that looks possible in theory but remains 30 years in the future (and has done for the last 60 years).
I would suggest that you sit back and carefully think about the implications of your statement that we would not know how much it would cost until we built it. Would you back any scheme where the designers were looking for a blank cheque?
my father used to say that ireland would be a great little country,if we could only get the irish out of it.
SOI are sniffing around Kells bay re hydro dam. I have no great problem with concept but it’s the secrecy re access to the construction site, the attitude is build a road through Kells and to hell with the environment ……Will oppose their proposals unless answers re access are delivered.
Turlough Hill has been off the grid for over two years now, so we actually have NO pumped storage facilities at all. The foolish optimism shown by some of the contributors is touching, the “willing peasant” syndrome! If you really want to look at one of these grandiose schemes that flopped, look no further than the plan to make Ennis the “digital centre of excellence” of Ireland. Hello? They handed out laptops and installed fibre-optic cable etc. and all that happened is that a minority of users were able to download porn even faster than before. Otherwise, no miracle happened!
Windmills and wind power are old technology – we only needed to change Moneypoint to Nuclear to meet our Kyoto targets, electrify the rail system and provide cheap electricity for domestic and transport usage.
You don’t believe this? Go to France where they have 80% nuclear-generated electricity for a half-century and see for yourself!
Having read all posts in this discussion, I conclude the following:
1/ There is not enough available information to check estimates. Both supporters some of whom probably have this information, and opposers argue their figures are correct. It is very likely probably neither are.
2/ Those opposing the idea definitely appear to have vested interests and have come preloaded with a bias AGAINST any such project be it wind generation OR pumped storage.
3/ Those supporting are saying there are massive potential benefits IF the details can be worked out, which will hugely outweigh any negatives.
4/ SoI says it is local community friendly and will work through any planning/environmental/financial issues with each community involved.
5/ The pumped storage lakes will be lined to prevent seawater damage with the dam using locally sourced rock and replanted to visually blend into the landscape.
6/ Certain posters, but especially SK, who started this thread initially claiming to agree with the theory of the project has descended into using swear words and attacking other posters as the true bias and disingenuous motives becomes apparent. My foremost question is what ties do they have to vested industry interests?
7/ Enough said.
Tawt, this is a 4 year old proposal, and we are still waiting for SoI to come up with detailed plans or proposals or anything else to show that their scheme has any merit.
The onus is on SoI to provide some substance to their proposal and its pretty grandiose claims. They have singularly failed to do so.
And as for me being negative as I represet a vested interest, I work as a consultant in the telcoms industry, and it’s more than 8 years since I even did any work in the Irish telco business. So I am about as disinterested a participant as you will find.
But as you (and SoI) have little else to build your case on I guess you have to fall back on weak ad-hominem attacks instead.