Comments on: Let us not forget the current Government caused this mess

By: Malcolm McClure

Malcolm McClure — Wed, 15 Apr 2009 15:36:12 +0000

Agreed, Furrylugs. The old bar-room adage ‘Drink, don’t think’, is an apt motto to express a common Irish attitude to intellectual rigor.
PS —I should, of course, have included Brian Friel in my fav. author list above.

By: Furrylugs

Furrylugs — Wed, 15 Apr 2009 15:02:06 +0000

It just seems sometimes Malcolm, that we have regressed to a lowest common denominator as a State.
“Cutism” seems to be valued far more than intellectual prowess.

By: Malcolm McClure

Malcolm McClure — Tue, 14 Apr 2009 22:58:01 +0000

Furrylugs:
I’ve been interested in Burke’s clearly expressed distinctions since I read his Sublime and Beautiful many years ago. I guess my favourite Irish writers were Burke, Wilde and Behan. (For different reasons).

By: Furrylugs

Furrylugs — Tue, 14 Apr 2009 22:10:41 +0000

Praise indeed Malcolm. Thank you.
This link for reference.

http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/burke/

By: liam

liam — Tue, 14 Apr 2009 18:08:51 +0000

One more thing, and sorry to go on but this is an area I have a particular interest in: don’t confuse peak power with average power. No power station operates continuously at peak output power. My 24TWh/year figure is actual annual consumption which when compared to the ESB’s total claimed peak power, implies an average load factor of about 60%, ignoring transmission losses.

By: liam

liam — Tue, 14 Apr 2009 17:59:09 +0000

Obviously, the solution is on the demand side as well as the supply side, your transmission efficiency example being a case in point.

By: liam

liam — Tue, 14 Apr 2009 17:57:39 +0000

Hi Malcolm,
Agree re the economics, that’s a very accurate summary. Just sometimes I think we get it a bit backwards, and rely totally on (sometimes inappropriate) economic models to determine policy, when in fact policy massively influences economics. Right now though, as I think you suggest, we’re in a battlefield triage scenario.

You’re totally right, it depends on scale, the larger the better. Nuclear is probably not the cheapest though, if it was, we and the Brits would be using it much more! Actually, the cost of nuclear is hard to gauge, since most countries (apart from France and Japan) have actively been scaling back their nukes. True, we import lots of gas from the UK, but they are just about not self sufficient anymore. See this report and in particular, the graph on page 2 for a summary:
http://www.parliament.uk/documents/upload/POSTpn230.pdf

The UK imports it in turn as LNG, just like we will do, and through pipes from the Norwegians and Russia, the only player of any consequence. This is probably not good, as no matter how much the Russians might like the Irish, we’re dependent on their relationships with the rest of the EU. We import about 90% of our gas and 100% of our oil, which combined represent about 90% of our total energy supply.

Re the numbers: Just looking at Corrib for a minute, back of an envelope calculations (feel free to verify, I might have cocked them up…):

60M cubic feet per day = 1.7M cubic m per day

1 cubic.m of NG = 38MJ chemical energy
1MJ = 0.2788kWh
1 cubic.m of NG = 10.56kWh
1.7M cubic m = 17.95 GWh per day
= 6.55TWh per year of embodied chemical energy
@60% thermodynamic conversion efficiency to jiggling electrons= 4TWh/year

Now,
Ireland electricity use ~= 24TWh/year
Ireland total energy use ~= 180TWh/year

To me, these are scarier numbers that the property bubble figures, and like that, we are not the only country with this problem.

By: Malcolm McClure

Malcolm McClure — Tue, 14 Apr 2009 15:09:38 +0000

Liam:Electricity is inherently cheaper when generated on a large scale, whether hydro, gas, oil, or coal powered plants— and nuclear is cheapest of all but politically unacceptable to some people in Ireland.

Our gas supply is becoming more closely integrated with the UK and Corrib Field off Mayo will be coming on stream shortly. That field will produce about 60 million cu. ft per day for about 20 years. If that were applied to generate electricity, it would produce about 350 MegaWatts.
Hydro is small, but the Ballyshannon power station produces about 65 MW at peak, sufficient to supply the whole of Donegal electricity consumption (Which it doesn’t, because of various grid links to the North and the production of at least seven large wind farms in the county, capable of in excess of 200 MW peak production.) The problem is power loss in the low voltage grids from Donegal down to the national grid at Carrick on Shannon where it can be delivered to somewhere that needs it in the South.

Re economics: Like any other analysis, it is only as good as the data available. Good economists lead a team of experts that sifts the available data but scorn high-falutin’ staistics. Bad economists just read the newspapers and tell their bosses what they want to hear.

By: G

Tue, 14 Apr 2009 11:27:00 +0000

Brian Crowley will be returned as Munster MEP, but FF by entering another MEP candidate for Munster threaten him, especially in these changing political times, Crowley is popular (not sure why? he kind of smiles a lot and has long hair, so people think him kind of quirky, but anything of political substance seems right wing to my mind)

By: G

Tue, 14 Apr 2009 11:24:32 +0000

@ Robert – it is not entirely true that Gregory got nothing, he did get somethings but not as much as was agreed, because as you correctly stated a general election occured and FG and Labour came in.

Check out Gregory’s last major interview in Hot Press, it obviously was something that bothered him for years as he knew he was near death and yet he still brought up Garett Fitzgerald’s attempts to prevent in-side toilets and houses being built for Dublin’s inner city population, something he said ‘to this day he doesn’t understand’!