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Everyone
knows that the cheapest way of doing something can turn out to be very
expensive in the end. The decision to make Ireland ’s electricity
system so reliant on gas is about to bear this principle out. By Richard Douthwaite.
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Everyone
knows that the cheapest way of doing something can turn out to be very
expensive in the end. The decision to make Ireland ’s electricity
system so reliant on gas is about to bear this principle out. By Richard Douthwaite
87% of the fuels to produce Ireland ’s electricity are imported. Gas is the most important, being burned to produce 48% of the country’s electricity. Its price has gone up from 33 pence sterling a therm last this time last year – a level which everyone thought was too high – to around 59 pence in early September this year when it was being quoted at 99-100 pence for early 2006 deliveries. If this tripling does take place, massive increases in electricity prices are inevitable.
Coal provides 26% of Irish electricity. The ESB is now paying $61 a tonne for it whereas in 2003, the average price of coal imported into the EU was $40. However, the cost of shipping has gone up from only $3 per tonne to $20 over the same period so the landed price of coal has effectively doubled and, because its CO2 emissions are worse than gas or oil, the extra permits needed to burn it add to its cost too. Even so, coal is still the cheapest fossil source of electricity in Ireland.
Heavy fuel oil, which provides 14% of the power supply, has gone up from $80 a tonne in 1999 to $260 a tonne today. Taking the three fuels together, the higher prices have added considerably to Ireland ’s import bill. In view of this and the fact that the price of electricity is seen as an important factor in this country’s international competitiveness, wouldn’t you expect the Government to have launched a crash programme to switch as much electricity production as possible away from imported fossil fuels and into Irish, non-carbon sources?
Well, there’s little sign of a rush to renewables going on. No contracts to connect windfarms to the high voltage transmission side of the grid offers were made between December 2003 and October 2004. The result was that a backlog of applications amounting to 2,500MW had built up by the end of the moratorium. Since then, connections have been offered to windfarms with a total capacity of 400MW. However, as Ireland’s total generating capacity is around 5,500MW and the transmission side of the grid will be unable to take more than 20% of its supplies from windfarms at least until an interconnector to Britain is available, the backlog will not be cleared for many, many years. “Many Irish windfarm developers are giving up and moving on to do other things,” Dr. Larry Staudt of the Centre for Renewable Energy at Dundalk IT (DkIT) says.
DkIT installed a 850kW wind turbine during August to meet its own electricity needs. It wanted to send any excess it generated into the grid but, in order to get permission to connect the turbine to its own electrical system and thus, indirectly to the grid, DkIT had to undertake not to supply the grid at all. This was so that no-one could be accused of allowing it to jump the backlog queue and means that the grid will not get non-fossil electricity worth an estimated €50,000 a year for an indefinite period. Yet if a company had wanted to buy that amount of power, wouldn’t it have been able to connect up almost straight away?
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