The inaccurate disingenuous debate being promoted by some politicians regarding the Migration and Asylum Pact is extraordinary.
Clearly it’s intentional.
Describing it as a treaty, or an attack on our sovereignty is clearly wrong but they continue to use this emotive language
I am 52 years old. I have been working since I was 15 years old. I have no savings, no retirement, and will never own a home before I die.
And there is now a trillionaire.
The crowd at the White House UFC fight will be one of the most diverse ever. There will be convicted felons, rapists, pedophiles, sex traffickers, domestic abusers and insurrectionists.
What "secret subsidy on household bills" ?! We aren't paying for datacenter's energy usage. The report by Dr. Fearon that suggests this has flaws.
When queried about the modelling methodology flaws on a webinar (a webinar hosted by datacenter servers!), Dr. Fearon ignored the question. He also spoke about a post-growth economy and is a member of Freinds of the Earth. Is this what we want Lynn? Degrowth? We can't even abide DC's powering themselves by their own renewables?! Just "big tech bad" taking our energy etc.
Ireland has a growing datacenter 'issue'. Every day, datacenters now consume 22GWh of energy from the grid... Enormous!!
We also have a wind energy problem. 29GWh was curtailed yesterday.. *more* energy than all datacenters here used.
This should signal to even non engineers: "intermittents just can't power datacenters"
🇮🇪 Ireland curtailed as much energy as it imported yesterday:
It's like throwing out all the perfectly good local Irish food in your fridge, and immediately replacing it all with a British made equivalent! 🇬🇧
Looks like a very compelling alternative. France is already supplying a good portion of Europe with nuclear energy. We need to be able to control as much of our energy supply as possible.
At 700MW, and barely exporting any power, this doesn't seem worth it anymore.
Ask the Swedes 🇸🇪 for two 300MW Sealer Reactors instead. Let them build it and ship two of them over here for grid connection. I'm sure we could manage the grid connection part ourselves.
Matt Cooper: Ireland needs more data centres, not fewer, and households should get a dividend
Providing those companies with the electricity to run their businesses seems like a reasonable investment by the state, not a pandering to the demands of foreign multinationals as some opportunistic environmental critics of the government and populist politicians like to claim.
It is a difficult argument to make these days, however, without being accused of kowtowing to big business.
The bigger issue is not who uses the electricity but how much of it is produced and distributed.
Payment of a data centre dividend would make it easier to get public buy-in for future developments, thereby protecting against the self-harm that would be done by further limiting permission for more to be constructed.
#datacentres #Cooper
https://t.co/NlReuiZES1
Here's a radical alternative plan for Ireland's energy transition:
💧1. Build new storage to match (and fix the problem of) the current level of GWh/day curtailment seen in @nialljburke's post. Preference to silvermines-type long duration pumped hydro storage plant / new Turlough Hill that will last >100years.
🚦2. Ban all new wind and solar farms unless they're built as "a hybrid"
i.e. Each new MW capacity is matched with same MW battery demand or MW in flexible industrial demand (agnostic to tech here so incl. hydrogen, crypto, water desalination... whatever) Include offshore wind in that stipulation.
⚛️3. Create a 30-year programme to shut down all gas and oil fired plants in the country and directly replace with SMR Nuclear on *existing* sites.
🌿4. Supplement with new BiogasCHP builds.
🏡5. Accelealrated roll out of electrification
(EVs, heatpumps, elec buses rail cooking etc) and legalise plugin solar for domestic use.
Applications for up to ~5 GW of new nuclear capacity in Sweden 🚀
Since December last year, Sweden has received four major applications related to new nuclear energy. This comes after several years of political work to reopen the door for new nuclear and prepare for up to 10 GW of new capacity by 2045. The applications are not all the same. Some are about site approval, while the Ringhals project is about state aid and financing support.
1️⃣ Videberg Kraft, owned by Vattenfall and Industrikraft Sverige, has applied for state aid for new reactors at Ringhals. That project is around 1.5 GW.
2️⃣ Kärnfull Next – a Studsvik company has applied for site approval in Valdemarsvik. The plan is 4-6 SMRs with a total capacity of around 1.2-1.6 GW.
3️⃣ Blykalla has applied for site approval in Norrsundet, Gävle. Their project is based on 6 SEALER-55 reactors with a total capacity of 330 MW.
4️⃣ Studsvik has applied for site approval in Studsvik, Nyköping. The application covers 2-4 light-water reactors with a total capacity of around 0.6-1.4 GW.
For a country that only a few years ago was still debating whether new nuclear would even happen, this is a pretty big shift. Sweden is increasingly looking like Europe’s front-runner for new clean firm power.