Keep the good work up. Really good podcast. I noticed Jim had mentioned in the last into that he would cover some further comments on inheritance tax but never got round to it. Any chance you can touch on the missed comments on the next podcast.
Very interesting podcast but the continued reference to wind being the cheapest form of energy and using LCOE (levelized cost of energy) as the metric to support this claim doesn't make sense in the context of the overall cost of energy to the system or the consumer.
For example the LCOE of an individual wind project may be €50/MWh and for a hypothetical gas plant it might be €100/MWh. This does not mean that the wind project will provide cheaper electricity for the consumer however as in reality the operation of electricity markets is a lot more complex than simply comparing 2 projects. When there is low wind on the system in Ireland we are currently relying on old, expensive and unreliable thermal plants like Tarbert and Moneypoint that are ~40 years old to provide power. The new efficient Gas plant at €100/MWh will replace these in the merit order and generate instead at a much lower cost reducing the cost of electricity during these periods. This would have a far bigger impact on the cost of electricity than adding a new wind project at €50/MWh.
The same logic applies to wind vs solar pv in Ireland at present. Because we have so little solar on the network in Ireland and already have substantial penetration of wind, the benefits of adding a new solar project to the system will likely outweigh the benefits of adding a new wind project even if the wind project has a lower LCOE. If you take the past summer as an example, during the heatwave there was little to no wind and we had essentially no solar on the system to generate electricity and displace more expensive plant from the merit order.
What we need is a diverse mix of different technologies to power our network and the cost of this power needs to be looked at from a system cost perspective, not an LCOE perspective which although useful in a certain context is fundamentally misleading when looking at the overall cost of electricity.
Hi Chris and Jim,
Keep the good work up. Really good podcast. I noticed Jim had mentioned in the last into that he would cover some further comments on inheritance tax but never got round to it. Any chance you can touch on the missed comments on the next podcast.
Hi Chris & Jim,
Very interesting podcast but the continued reference to wind being the cheapest form of energy and using LCOE (levelized cost of energy) as the metric to support this claim doesn't make sense in the context of the overall cost of energy to the system or the consumer.
For example the LCOE of an individual wind project may be €50/MWh and for a hypothetical gas plant it might be €100/MWh. This does not mean that the wind project will provide cheaper electricity for the consumer however as in reality the operation of electricity markets is a lot more complex than simply comparing 2 projects. When there is low wind on the system in Ireland we are currently relying on old, expensive and unreliable thermal plants like Tarbert and Moneypoint that are ~40 years old to provide power. The new efficient Gas plant at €100/MWh will replace these in the merit order and generate instead at a much lower cost reducing the cost of electricity during these periods. This would have a far bigger impact on the cost of electricity than adding a new wind project at €50/MWh.
The same logic applies to wind vs solar pv in Ireland at present. Because we have so little solar on the network in Ireland and already have substantial penetration of wind, the benefits of adding a new solar project to the system will likely outweigh the benefits of adding a new wind project even if the wind project has a lower LCOE. If you take the past summer as an example, during the heatwave there was little to no wind and we had essentially no solar on the system to generate electricity and displace more expensive plant from the merit order.
What we need is a diverse mix of different technologies to power our network and the cost of this power needs to be looked at from a system cost perspective, not an LCOE perspective which although useful in a certain context is fundamentally misleading when looking at the overall cost of electricity.