The orientation is important but youâll see that East West for example doesnât see a huge drop off in performance.
And then there is shading to be factored in⌠Do you really want to cut down a few trees to up PV performance?
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Animal waste/slurry. Can that be economically be treated to create energy on a viable basis or is it the proverbial pipe dream?
From my understanding of it, biogas plants rely on subsidies to be viable. I donât know much about them other than that though
Energy bills in UK are going to be over 300 pounds a month this winter . This is going to push social cohesion to the precipice when people die because they canât afford to heat their homes and feed themselves
Energy bills here are worse and only going up
Mates pub is currently at e3000 per month electric bill
Exactly near double of what it was this time last year
Where are all the pretend covid19 economistâs who said we could borrow money forever only last year??
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We were told by the anti-EU bots this was impossible.
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What happens when the wind doesnât blow?
RTE news : Second amber alert for electricity generation system
http://www.rte.ie/news/business/2022/0810/1314893-amber-electricity-alert/
Wind energy is a cod. Wave energy is where its at.
Yikes - gas up 500 per cent in UK this winter. Inflation at 15 per cent ?
Governments will be forced into some sort of
a bail out of households across Europe this winter for sure.
Might force a few back into the office as WFH in a cold house isnât too palatable.
Anyway, time to seal up and draughts and give a once over to the attic insulation.
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The winter energy situation is starting to come into focus, and itâs very bad.
Since the beginning of August, the gas price has shot upward. The following chart shows UK gas futures price curves. Each curve is the marketâs best guess at gas prices at future dates. The date of the marketâs guess is shown. As you can see, futures prices across the curve have risen and risen in the last year.
When you plug those wholesale prices into the formulas that estimate household energy prices, you get mad numbers. Citi, a bank, has forecast UK household energy bills could rise to ÂŁ5,800 (âŹ6,800) per year by April of 2023.
Itâs a similar story across Europe. On Monday alone, TTF Natural Gas futures rose 19 per cent, German Baseload rose 18.5 per cent, and French Base Power Forwards rose 19.8 per cent. The following map from Javier Blas shows day-ahead electricity prices across Europe; âŹ75-100 per MWh would previously have been considered expensive.
Yesterday FinGrid, the grid operator in Finland, said: âFinns should be prepared for possible power outages caused by electricity shortages this coming winterâ. And yesterday Alexander De Croo, Belgiumâs Prime Minister, said Europe is facing âfive to tenâ difficult winters.
If Ireland came anywhere close to Citiâs âŹ6,400 estimate for 2023 UK household energy bills would utterly ruin many households and businesses.
But that number is so preposterously large that it wonât be allowed to happen. It would put half the country in poverty.
Studying the deadly Bengal Famine of 1943, the economist Amartya Sen observed that deadly famines are more likely in authoritarian than democratic societies. Thatâs because, in democracies, vote-seeking politicians ensure that relief gets to people in need. Authoritarian rules donât care or donât know about ordinary people. This was later called Senâs Law.
What weâre going to see this winter in Europe is Senâs Law in action: governments will be forced to bail out households. And the bills will be huge.
Demand destruction
Even given bailouts, energy prices for households will be astronomical. Thatâs because the energy crisis is one of quantities as well as prices. There isnât enough gas to go around. We need to use less of it. No amount of bailouts will resolve this.
Prices need to stay high to force everyone to cut back. Households will have to use less heating, less petrol and less electricity. The same for industry and commerce.
The problem with the demand destruction strategy is that Ireland isnât an industrial powerhouse. There arenât twenty giant factories guzzling up a big chunk of our nationâs gas supply. Only 19 per cent of Irelandâs energy went to industry in 2020. By contrast, 61 per cent of Irelandâs energy was used for residential and transport purposes.
Industry has already cut back by, for example, shifting production overseas. On a European level, industrial energy demand is below where it was at the bottom of lockdown in 2020. Itâs down about 20 per cent.
What about data centres? According to Eirgrid, in 2020, demand from data centres was forecast to reach about 70 kilotons of oil equivalent (ktoe). In 2020, according to SEAI, Irelandâs total energy demand came to 11,258 ktoe. So data centres currently make up about 0.6 per cent of annual energy usage. To be sure, annual energy usage includes everything from jet fuel to gas-fired central heating, electricity and diesel-powered cars. If you focus instead on electricity demand, data centres use up about a quarter of the total.
The upshot is that thereâs no way households can escape whatâs coming. The question is how much energy usage they can cut back, and how much relief governments will offer.
Cagey companies
When demand for face masks mushroomed in early 2020, the private sector did its thing and within a couple of months there were enough masks to go around.
But this time around, donât expect private enterprise to perform miracles. The energy industry has been here before. High prices signal to energy companies that it would be profitable to frack more gas and drill more coal; everybody fracks and drills and digs at the same time; and the price collapses, leaving energy company investors holding the tab.
Thatâs what happened in the first fracking boom, beginning in the mid-2000s. Billions were invested in the new technology. But fracking was a victim of its own success: the market got swamped, and more than 200 200 North American producers went under after 2015. Collectively, they owed more than $130 billion.
Now, the gas industry mantra is capital efficiency. Producers are very slow to invest in new production before shareholders get their piece.
Itâs a similar story with coal. The commodity trading giant Glencore is the worldâs biggest coal producer. As pointed out on the Odd Lots podcast, Glencore has been taking heat from investors for years now over coalâs nasty emissions profile. But all of a sudden, on its most recent earnings call, a Bank of America analyst asked what it would take to delay its ramp down of coal mining, and invest to increase production in the short term, âto give the world the energy it needsâ.
The risk for Glencore is that it pumps up coal production, and then coal finds itself out of fashion once again.
Desperate governments
If energy companies are being cagey with their investment, governments are pulling out all the stops. The plan is to ship in as much north American fracked gas on liquified natural gas (LNG) tankers as possible.
European countries are investing in floating storage regasification units, or FSRUs. These giant machines are basically floating liquified natural gas (LNG) terminals. They take the gas from LNG tankers and pump it into the national system. The German state government in Lower Saxony is reported to be facilitating the first of these terminals at eight times the normal speed.
Germany has acquired two FSRUs this summer, which will contribute 13 per cent of the countryâs natural gas demand this winter. Another two projects are planned to come on stream next year. Italy, the UK, Greece and Lithuania have also made deals to secure FSRUs this year.
In Ireland, plans for an LNG terminal in North Kerry are moving along slowly. A decision is expected by September 9th. In the event of a yes, it would be years before the gas came on stream. In the meantime, we should brace ourselves for broken household budgets and protests on the streets
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The joys of an A rated house in th countryside mate 
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The dynamics are different in UK⌠Houshold electricy expensive and commercial is less so
In Ireland household elec is far far cheaper than commercialâŚ
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Yeah. Commercial prices have shot up in recent weeks but they seem to be holding the household rates fairly steady. Iv never heard it mentioned but there must be a massive subsiding of household through commercial rate
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We are the chosen ones.
Weâll be fine lads, we live in Ireland, not the North Pole. Get the insulation done if the house isnât warm.
I see they are progressing a deal with Iran at the moment, theyâll find a way to work away without the Ruskies.
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Are any of these EV driving wankers getting free charging anymore?