Wind met 84% of Ireland’s electricity demand yesterday. That’s the second highest daily average ever

18 comments

1. inb4: ” but it’s not windy all the time!!” and “then why is my bill 7 million euro?!?”

2. That’s pretty cool stat. Is there any benefit to consumers in the short or medium term?

3. That’s 84% of the instantaneous peak demand – not 84% of the total electricity used over a 24 hour period, I think.

4. How much is a barrel of wind?

5. What a time to be alive.

6. Love seeing these posts

7. Has out capacity for wind gone up this year by much? Also wish we had this sort of data for solar

8. A big issue with electricity is that you can’t really store it except in some exceptional cases so you have to increase or decrease your production to respond to load on the system. The way the system works is we have different generators that all feed into a pool. At any one time the price of the electricity in that pool is set by the highest price per unit to produce it, and the suppliers buy from the wholesale market pool to sell on to the customers. This is called system marginal pricing (SMP).

   In most times this is fine, SMP means that the expensive generators don’t get turned on unless they’re absolutely needed as they’re considered “Out of Merit”, but the issue is we now have a wide array of different sources, from wind to solar to hydro to gas to oil. If the price of gas is really high, and a gas generator is needed to get the energy the market needs, it will set the price per unit for all leccy to be really high regardless of the source of that leccy, and that cost is seen as much by the suppliers as it is by the customers.

   A good question to ask is whether it’s a good idea to have a single pool from which we buy electricity from, but the fact that wind or solar can be charged at the same rate as oil or gas makes it an attractive investment. Theres also good reason to hope that things will change, and as we move to electric vehicles we’ll end up with massive grid of batteries. If done right, and if theres a percentage of the battery which the grid can draw from, this will mean that we can store renewable when the goings good.

9. Better get on that storage of variable supply. My bet is on electrolysis and stationary hydrogen fuel cells.

10. They are using the same price as gas at wholesale. It’s a complete scam.

11. …yet, I pay €0.39 per kWh “because war”.

12. We need loads of off shore wind now!

13. It is good one can storage wind energy for later use, in barrels, buckets and so one.

    Wait, can’t…what a bummer.

    If there only could be way to turn energy from wind to other one…like hydrogen.

    But I guess it is too much work involved, huh?

14. So outside of the buying investment and running cost when do we the consumer see a cost reduction to this free energy generation???

15. This is fantastic news, but the reality is that renewable sources will be hamstrung until we bring batteries online at the same rate. Lots of progress with this in the UK, where asset management funds are purchasing fleets of batteries and entering the many power markets (and making a s**t ton of money)

16. Now that’s sexy af, now there’s a good reason not to be upset how fucking TERRIBLE the weather is rn lol

17. The war in Ukraine has made wind very expensive!

18. Not to mention all the great dryin’ there was in it!