this post was submitted on 01 Oct 2023
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What? Why? Why tf would you have a cap on renewable energy percentage?
What changes?
I'm going to guess that they can slow down fossil fuel plants, but not turn them off because they would take too long to start up again.
That does make sense, so it needs to consistently be above x percent for the cap to be raised to x percent.
Maybe the same issue as here in Germany, there are basically not the capacity in the electricity grid to being all this energy to the consumer.. In Germany the issue is, to bring the energy from the northern down to the south (direction to the alps), because there is basically no electricity line existing 😅
Inflexibility of conventional power plants is one issue, but for Ireland things have developed to a point I suspect it is no longer the main operational constraint on the grid.
Ireland is an island grid and needs to keep system inertia on its own (HVDC connection with neighbors cannot synchronize Ireland's grid with UK's, let alone continental Europe). This service is traditionally provided by conventional power plants in GW scale grids, but soon when synchronous condenser and inverter-based solutions become norm, there is no reason why 100% instantaneous wind + solar is not possible as shown already in various microgrids.
Similar develop can be observed in other islanded or nearly islanded GW scale grids such as South Australia.