Floating Wind comes to Ireland

The graph above shows how the Republic of Ireland gets its electricity. From 2005 to 2018 demand rose slightly, wind power grew quite quickly and coal shrank slowly. Over the next decade coal use will cease, so too should the burning of peat, and gas use will plummet. The Irish electricity grid will be one of the first to run almost entirely on wind power. Here’s how.

The news last month is that the huge (915MW) Moneypoint power station, on the Shannon estuary is to close. It is, or was, Ireland’s only coal-fired power station, and has been used less and less over recent years as wind power has been built. The site will become a hub for an even larger (1,400MW) new floating offshore wind farm, and a centre for the production of green hydrogen. In a small country like Ireland a single big project like this will have a huge impact, and it is likely that other similar projects will follow. The Atlantic off the coast of Ireland, and Scotland, is the windiest part of Europe, and many more large scale floating wind farms are likely to be built there, helping the whole of Europe decarbonise its electricity sector. Ireland, like Scotland, is likely to become a major exporter of zero carbon energy.

In 2017 I wrote a blog about the opening in Scotland of Hywind, the world’s first floating offshore windfarm. It was a 30MW pilot project, designed to test the technology, and I speculated that if it proved successful other larger projects would follow. This new 1,400MW project in the Atlantic off the coasts of Kerry and Clare will link back to onshore facilities at Moneypoint on the Shannon. The existing power grid that served the old coal power station can be re-purposed for the wind powered electricity to be used across Ireland, in Dublin and on to the UK. In times of surplus wind power green hydrogen will be made, and stored in order to generate electricity at times of no wind, and for other industrial uses, or for export, shipping it from the Shannon, to countries like Germany.

Also in 2017 I posted a blog titled ‘Can Companies Change?’ In it I looked at DONG, (Danish Oil and Gas), which has transitioned from a fossil fuel company to become the world’s largest developer of offshore wind farms, and divested itself of its former fossil fuel assets, and in the process re-branded itself Orsted. Few companies have made such a dramatic 100% transformation. The Norwegian company Statoil has rebranded itself Equinor. It was the company behind Hywind, and now this project in Ireland. It is scaling up its commitment to offshore wind, and is the world leader in floating turbines, while still saying oil and gas will remain its core business. My view is that over time most of the oil majors will go bankrupt as fossil fuel reserves become worthless. Maybe in time Equinor will have to choose, fossil fuels or renewables? For now it is good that it is putting a lot of money and expertise into floating wind power. Floating wind power now is at an embryonic stage, but it will inevitably grow, hopefully helping to displace much fossil fuel use, and so eventually making those fossil fuel assets worthless.

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