We will touch upon 4 topics, all linked but quite separate,
- Paris failure and what to do about it
- The future of European energy supply
- Ireland’s response
- SuperNode developing new grid technology.
You have all read about Oregon, California, BC, Washington, NSW. Unprecedented fires and drought. Is the western US becoming a desert? Fires in western North America release more greenhouse gases than the UK.
There is the loss of sea ice, For example, since the satellite data record began in 1978, average Arctic sea ice extent in September has decreased by around 13% per decade. Hurricanes increase in numbers and intensity and scarcely get reported on now.
Macroeconomic indicators, $2.9 trillion cost, $8 Billion per day 4.5 million deaths in 2018 resulting from the burning of fossil fuels
36 billion tonnes of CO2 added to the atmosphere in 2019
Mr Trump would call me a climate alarmist. I am guilty as charged.
Somebody is paying for this damage. Just because we here in Ireland are paying little up to now does not mean that the suffering and payments of others will not be felt here, from rising sea levels, hurricanes, and uncontrolled flooding among others.
Why is this happening: the use of fossil fuels, and the CO2 that ensues. Concentration up 50% since pre-industrial times. the international system of dealing with crises has been found wanting and this has lead to the failure of the Paris Accord and the Failure of the Kyoto protocol before it. In both cases the US Republican Presidents Bush and Trump pulled out. They could do it with impunity because there were no costs associated with their actions.
William Nordhaus, Nobel Laureate pointed out the failures of Paris/Kyoto. The principle reason is that it costs the leaving country nothing.
There is the concept of free riding. The countries which have positive policies and engage in a spend to counteract the rise in emissions, bestow a benefit on countries which do nothing. This gives rise to free riding by those countries.
The Paris accord needs to be replaced with an international treaty that has teeth.
Willian Nordhaus proposed a solution: set up a club of nations who commit to doing something about curbing emissions, and erect tariffs against those who choose not to join the club.
The most effective way to decarbonise energy is to migrate all sources of energy to electricity and to have all electricity generated from non carbon sources. The great majority of electricity will be generated from wind and solar. I have studied how much it will cost the world to make all our electricity from renewables (with some nuclear, biomass and geothermal), including grids and battery storage. If we were to spend in the order of $1.3 trillion per annum, for 40 years we would achieve our decarbonisation goals
This is approx. 4 times what we spend at the moment.
Where can this money come from?
I have proposed the idea of a Climate Bond: long term loan with a 30 to 40 years locked up period. It would be guaranteed by the Club nations. It would have a low coupon as it is government backed. Pension funds, sovereign wealth funds, and high net worth families would all invest in this low risk low return instrument. There is a large amount of money accumulated in families and their interest in investing would be heightened, particularly if the money, when paid back, would be free from inheritance tax.
The logical question that arises is: what about the global ability to pay the Climate Bond back? There is a report published in 2020 by a group of Chinese academics, lead by Professor Wie which concluded that the GDP of the world would be cumulatively $600 trillion better off by 2100 if decarbonisation were to happen.
This is the paymaster for the paying of the Climate Bonds.
So a global spend of $42 trillion gives rise to a benefit of $600 tr.
Basically all energy globally will be supplied by electricity generated from wind, and solar, some nuclear, some biomass and geothermal. No fossil fuels will be used in the making of energy.
This represents a massive change in energy sources, in geo-politics, in the purpose of corporations, in transport and heating and cooling sectors, in consultancy activities, in employment, in physical and virtual energy trading arrangements.
Because of the nature of renewable energy, Electricity will have moved from being a national endeavour to being continental in scope.
This latter point needs some explanation. Take Europe for example. The 2 major energy sources in Europe are wind and solar. Wind is strongest in the seas around the land periphery, stretching from the Gulf of Bothnia through the Baltic, the North sea, the North Atlantic and reaching the Mid Atlantic off the Portuguese coast. Solar is strongest in the Mediterranean area
Some areas in Europe are poor in renewable energy terms.
Most of Poland, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Hungary, southern Germany, Switzerland, Eastern France, the Balkans, Macedonia, northern Greece have little in the way of renewable energy. If Europe is to remain a coherent political unit, then sustainable energy for all has to be organised.
The EU Commission has estimated that 450,000MW of wind generated energy needs to be built in the seas around Europe with 700,000MW built on land. I frankly don’t believe that this quantity can be built on land. And besides the EU is not factoring in 100% renewables, but still includes the use of fossil fuels combined with carbon capture and storage into the equation. A more appropriate figure for the offshore wind build would be circa 900,000MW. This is an electricity system a little bit smaller than the entire US system.
The same quantity of solar has to be built around the Mediterranean Basin. This build will be fundamentally on land.
So what happens in Europe is that 2 great energy systems need to be built and linked to decarbonise European energy.
No debate whatever has happened on the subject of the design of a grid which will be needed to transmit, in all likelihood, 900,000MW of offshore wind around Europe. Even less debate is centred around how the 2 great energy systems of Europe are to be linked. Solar in the south and wind in the north.
For the most part the grid needed to capture and transmit this energy doesn’t exist. To completely electrify Europe the following changes to existing grid design have to be incorporated.
- A large part of the grid has to be under water
- Just as is the case with on-shore grids, the new underwater grid needs to be meshed, thereby offering multiple routes to the customer, in the event of failure of any particular route
- For technical reasons the grid needs to be constructed using DC, instead of AC as heretofore
- With renewables there are other reason why a grid has to be built:
- Renewables are variable in output with wind and genuinely intermittent with solar. Without a grid linking all sources of supply, peaks of generation would occur in the country local to the storm in the case of wind, and during the day only in the case of solar.
- Linking the wind and solar supply systems compensates in part for the weakness of solar in Winter, while wind is stronger in northern climes, and similarly in Summer wind can be weaker in the north whereas solar is stronger in the south.
- Building a meshed grid cuts down on the amount of battery storage that has to be installed, because variability, which storage is designed to cope with, is lessened by the grid.
- Eastern and mid Europe has to be supplied with renewable energy. Because of the few resources that exist there, they need a grid to carry the power to them.
Building wind energy at sea makes more sense than building on land. There are a few reasons for this.
Firstly, scale is possible at sea. The average size of windfarm at sea is in the range of 500 to 1000MW. On land the average size of windfarm is in the range 5 to 50MW.
Secondly wind speeds are higher at sea. On land in Ireland and the UK there is a wind speed of circa 7 – 8M/S, whereas offshore the wind speeds in Europe range from 8 to 11M/S. This leads to higher capacity factors. At our Neart na Gaoithe site, the capacity factor is 53%. Off the west coast of Ireland the capacity factor is 65%.
Thirdly the size of wind turbines that can be deployed at sea is much bigger than can be used on shore. The average size on land now is circa 5MW whereas the size offshore is 10MW. Already GE have tested a 13MW machine, which is extendible to 17MW and Siemens Gamesa has developed a 15MW machine.
And so on to what Ireland’s response could be to decarbonising Europe.
The programme for the current Government calls for 30,000MW to be built using floating turbines off the West and South coasts. Hildegarde Naughton’s committee in the last Dail went so far as to suggest 75,000MW could be built.
Before Ireland can seriously contemplate building between 30 and 75,000 MW we need to consider the following:
What is at stake is an industrial initiative, the likes of which has not been attempted in Ireland up to this point. The wealth of Ireland has been growing significantly since the 1970s due to our membership of the European Union, which lead to a massive and sustained FDI by mainly US multinationals. Not only has investment happened, but a great enhancement of the Irish skills base and attitude towards risk has also occurred. Taxation has increased, employment has soared, population has grown to levels not seen since the founding of the state. Our infrastructure has been transformed into that of a modern economy. 30% of our GDP comes from manufacturing, which is a massive outlier in the developed world. Germany’s manufacturing accounts for 20%, while the UK’s amounts to 10%.
This big industrial base is not based on Ireland’s natural resources.
Neither is it based on research and development, generated indigenously. Because the bulk of our manufacturing does not depend on cheap labour, it is fundamentally research based. The research underpinning the globally successful companies manufacturing here was carried out elsewhere.
Building 30,000MW off the West and South coasts is based on our natural resources. It will also require a level of research and development we have not had to undertake to arrive at our present state of wealth.
Of equal difficulty to this massive project is the co-ordination needed across a number of Government Departments and agencies.
Organisation
- How is co-ordination across Government Departments to be organised, given that there are 11 different Departments and Agencies are involved in the floating offshore venture. Which Government Department will lead the drive?
Wind farm location
- Where will the wind farms be located?
- What type of floating platform is appropriate for the intense weather conditions that are experienced off the west coast in particular? Nowhere else in Europe has 11M/S windspeeds, with corresponding swells and waves. Research and Experimentation with various platforms will have to happen.
Grid to get power to continental customer
- How is the power to be transferred from where it is generated to the European customer. As Minister Ryan has pointed out 30,000MW will generate 6 times the electricity currently consumed in Ireland. A new offshore meshed grid is needed. R+D into superconductivity to deliver cheaper power could make Ireland a leader in this industrial space.
- The quantity of storage needed to back up un-dispatchable wind and solar generation has to be planned for
Planning and leasing offshore territory
- What type of planning regime is needed to be put in place, and who will grant the planning consents?
- What strategic environmental studies will need to be carried out to establish a baseline for deciding where farms are to be located as well as deciding where R+D activities are to be carried out?
- How will offshore territory be leased, by whom, under what conditions?
- Will Ireland create a dedicated offshore wind leasing entity to generate long term revenue for the Irish taxpayer from the Windfarm leases?
- If 30,000MW are built, and the price per MWH is €50, and a rent of 2.5% of revenues received is the Government’s charge, then income per annum would be €213.5m
- What kind of areas will be leased, for instance, Zones or individual plots?
Marketing and selling green electricity
- The price of electricity in Ireland will have to be adjusted so as to harmonise with the average in Europe.
- What we are facing into is an integration and unification of power generation, transmission, and distribution in Europe. What kind of regulatory regime does the Irish Government want to see across Europe? Free access to all nations for Irish electricity is a basic regulatory requirement.
- Private sector involvement in grid building to ensure innovation and lowering the cost, just as has been done with opening the generation space to competition seems like a logical proposition for the EU
Capital provision and intellectual property
- How will Ireland compete with other nations for capital, and intellectual property,
- How can the SME sector be incentivised to develop the intellectual property?
- Has the Green IFSC a role to play in providing funding?
- The capital cost of building 30,000 MW have a total cost of €45Bn Bigger numbers of megawatts built would be correspondingly greater
Industrial development and employment
- What strategy will the IDA have to embrace to attract floating offshore technology developers into Ireland? There are none at the moment
- What ports will be designated for which aspects of R+D, and demonstration, for advance sea bed investigations, and for operations and maintenance of wind farms
- Specialised ship design is a feature of offshore wind. Would government be interested in attracting this specialised industry to the ports in Ireland
- What investments in ports will have be made to bring them up to the standards needed to support a large floating offshore ventures?
European Competition
- Each European country will be trying to claim the lions share of generation in its territorial waters; how is Ireland going to ensure it delivers between 30,000 and 75,000 MW into the European generation and transmission mix?
In conclusion let me say I have set up a company called Supernode which will build the new grid, using superconductivity.
Thank you for your attention