Your Country Your Call.

[eamo1]

Here's a link to some of the suggestions so far for the "Your Country Your Call" initiative started by President Mary Mc Aleese last week.This is a good initiative i think,interesting to see what kind of idea's come from it and what the 2 winning one's are.

http://www.yourcountryyourcall.com/about.html

I like the Noah's Ark suggestion,it will solve the flooding problems and generate jobs in the construction industry again:rolleyes:.There's some good suggestion's,like moving into software developement which is a massive industry these days.

[eamo1]

On the bottom right of the page on that link is a link for "open for proposals" in which the suggestions are in.

[peadar1987]

I've put in my opinion that we should invest in the development of renewable energy. A few people beat me to the punch, but the more support the scheme has the better!

[dahamsta]

Great idea, horrific implementation.

[monutdfc]

From the Competition Terms and Conditions:

5.8 All Proposals must be in English.
Is leatsa é indeed!

7.2 At Promoter’s option, in consideration of entry into the Competition the winning Participants (including, where relevant, all Team members of such Participants) shall irrevocably transfer, convey and assign to the Promoter (or such party that the Promoter may direct) all right, title and interest in and to the winning Proposal and all Intellectual Property Rights therein (excluding moral rights). The winning Participants (including, where relevant, all Team members of such Participants) further agree to waive all moral rights relating thereto and agree to execute all documents and perform all acts deemed necessary by the Promoter to apply for, register, perfect and record such transfer and assignment and/or waivers.
So give us your ideas and if we like them we'll keep them for ourselves

[Macy]

Didn't some crowd do this or something very similar last year, lead by some journo? Even down to taking the good ideas?

Must be the effect of the Greens in Government that everything gets feckin recycle and reused...

[Bluebeard]

Hmm. You elect us to run the country, you pay us to do this, and we get you to make the decisions, and give us ideas how to get us out of the fix that we got ourselves into, and take the credit...

Better than the previous system of looking for excuses rather than solutions, I suppose.

[Macy]

It was the "ideas campaign" that was running last year. http://www.ideascampaign.ie/about/

[peadar1987]

It's great, I think. 4 million people in the country, somebody out there must have the solutions! Although I did end up having an argument with someone who was convinced he had invented a magic perpetual motion machine the government should invest in before he was killed!

[eamo1]

There was a guy on Today FM's The Last Word program a few years ago who claimed he could harness unlimited energy by using magnetic fields etc.He put an ad in The Economist and other publications for scientists to review his findings and approve(or disapprove) of them.I had been keeping an eye out for anything further news on it but the guy seems to have "disappeared",hmm;).
I think this innitiative is good but obviously the winner should get all the credit and not,as someone said, some incompetent politician who will try take credit for it.

[dahamsta]

You're thinking of Steorn (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steorn). Seán McCarthy is still peddling that crap around. There's no such thing as free energy, you might as well hook electrodes up to David Blaine, or believe that sugar and water can cure cancer (http://www.badscience.net/2010/02/the-bbc-have-found-someone-whose-cancer-was-cured-by-homeopathy/).

[Bluebeard]

Ugh. More nonscience. It's fools like that who make a very good case to employ a police force dedicated to upholding the laws of physics.

[dahamsta]

Ben Goldacre for Chief, Simon Singh for Depitee.

[gilberto_eire]

I say we put it all on Kauto Star in the Gold Cup at Cheltenham

[Lionel Ritchie]

We could make nuclear weapons for the Iranians?

Everyone wins. We get their oil money, they get their nuclear weapons, the international community gets reassurance that while Iran owns nuclear weapons -the whole operation has been outsourced. For an extra fee we, here in Ireland, could even point their nuclear weapons at America which would serve to reassure the Americans that their chances of actually being hit by one is at best remote.

Now all we have to get over is the moral conundrum of being a neutral country contemplating allowing a belligerents ordinance pass through our airspace, airports and borders ....hmmm.

[Stevo Da Gull]

With regards to magnetic energy and other renewable energy forms. They're perfectly legitimate ideas, despite what the scaremongerers will say. The simple fact is, there is no/comparitvely little money to be made from an unlimited energy source, so it wouldn't be supported until all money making sources have been exhausted, regardless of the benefits to your average joe and the environment.

[osarusan]

The simple fact is, there is no/comparitvely little money to be made from an unlimited energy source.
what do you mean by this?

[Stevo Da Gull]

what do you mean by this?

When an energy source is unlimited and very cheap to harness, you can't ethically charge people a lot for using it. The amount of money that is made from oil dwarfs the potential profit from any renewable source by quite a way. If we stick with oil as an example, there are a huge amount of jobs in the oil industry - in research, on riggs and so forth. Once you're tapping an unlimited energy source - wave power, for example, there's nowhere near as much employment needed.

[John83]

With regards to magnetic energy and other renewable energy forms. They're perfectly legitimate ideas, despite what the scaremongerers will say. The simple fact is, there is no/comparitvely little money to be made from an unlimited energy source, so it wouldn't be supported until all money making sources have been exhausted, regardless of the benefits to your average joe and the environment.
No, they're not. If you can prove differently, you'll get a Nobel Prize in Physics and make enough money from the patent to buy Denmark.


When an energy source is unlimited and very cheap to harness, you can't ethically charge people a lot for using it. The amount of money that is made from oil dwarfs the potential profit from any renewable source by quite a way. If we stick with oil as an example, there are a huge amount of jobs in the oil industry - in research, on riggs and so forth. Once you're tapping an unlimited energy source - wave power, for example, there's nowhere near as much employment needed.
Do you really think there's no jobs in research and on plants for renewables? Ha! Propose a cheap way of harnessing wave energy. Go on, I dare you.

[dahamsta]

<dahamsta lols>

I've created an unlimited energy machine powered by homeopathists!

[Schumi]

there is no/comparitvely little money to be made from an unlimited energy source.There's no money to be made from an unlimited energy source, because it's impossible.

[dahamsta]

Of course it's possible Schumi, the faeries make it with honey and locks of blonde hair and pony tears.

[Stevo Da Gull]

No, they're not. If you can prove differently, you'll get a Nobel Prize in Physics and make enough money from the patent to buy Denmark.


Do you really think there's no jobs in research and on plants for renewables? Ha! Propose a cheap way of harnessing wave energy. Go on, I dare you.

The initial stages of harnessing such energy would require a fair amount of employment, but once you're tapping the energy then the need for employment shrinks. There would always be jobs in research, but there'd be nowhere near as many labourers needed.

With regards to proving the legitimacy of renewable sources. It is a reasonably new field. We already know of the phenominal potential of various forms of renewable energy, and the technology to harness the energy is not many years off becoming a reality. Unfortunately, most of the top scientists around the world aren't being paid to solve the problem of efficiently extracting renewable enrgy from the earth.

I'm aware that I haven't proved anything. But I think it's bizzare to scoff at renewable energy. With technology constantly improving, it's only a matter of time before we find extremely efficient ways of harnessing renewable energy. But we'd rather keep throwing money at the present systems.. sure we're just crazy with all this talk of renewable energy, like those fellas years ago who said that people could build crafts that could fly through the air.

[dahamsta]

You do realise there's a difference between renewable energy and magic energy, right?

[osarusan]

No, they're not. If you can prove differently, you'll get a Nobel Prize in Physics and make enough money from the patent to buy Denmark.
What part of his post is this a reply to?

[Stevo Da Gull]

You do realise there's a difference between renewable energy and magic energy, right?

Yip, I just don't think that we should dismiss it completely. Let's have a bit more research, rather than taking digs about faeries and whatever else. I'm not saying that we should throw all of our money at researching magnetc energy, that would be crazy. I'm not a fanatical advocate of magnetic energy (well, I am a fan of MagLevs, but that's different), but such a complete dismissal seems a bit short sighted to me. I am more of an advocate for other forms of renewable energy myself, I just dislike the thought that because we don't know how to do it yet, we should forget about it.

[John83]

Yip, I just don't think that we should dismiss it completely. Let's have a bit more research, rather than taking digs about faeries and whatever else. I'm not saying that we should throw all of our money at researching magnetc energy, that would be crazy. I'm not a huge advocate of magnetic energy (well, I am a fan of MagLevs, but that's different), but such a complete dismissal seems a bit short sighted to me. I am more of an advocate for other forms of renewable energy myself, I just dislike the thought that because we don't know how to do it yet, we should forget about it.
It's not that "we don't know how to do it", it's that we can prove that there's no energy gain there to be harvested. That's why people with technical backgrounds are so dismissive of it.

[pineapple stu]

When an energy source is unlimited and very cheap to harness, you can't ethically charge people a lot for using it.
Since when do ethics come into price setting?

[dahamsta]

In my experience, business size is inversely proportional to the application of ethics. In fact, awareness might even be a more appropriate term, if you exclude use for marketing purposes.

[pineapple stu]

Yup. And a company with free energy with be rather big.

Anyway, it's amazing how many people won't believe professional scientists when they say something physically can't be done.

[Stevo Da Gull]

Man do I hate this..

I mixed up the magnetic energy mentioned in this thread with the sort of stuff that these folks do http://www.amsc.com/aboutus/about_super.html So let's say I may have been wrong there.. and let's never speak of it again ;)

With regards to ethics, price setting and profit from renewable energy. If, in future we effectively tapped, for arguements sake geothermal energy*, you couldn't possibly charge more for the use of energy than we do for the use of something as abundant as water. Well, you could possibly, but it would be very wrong. It would would like producing shoes that cost a few dollars to make and then selling them for a couple of hundred euros while paying the labourers pittance.. oh wait

*Not of direct interest to us in Ireland.

Anyhow, how have foot.ie'rs been voting so far?

[eamo1]

Ireland does lag behind other countries with reguards harnessing Wind,Solar,Wave energy.I often thought why not put a couple of hundred wind turbines along the west coast where there's a near constant wind blowing(gulf stream etc).It obviously too expensive to put them out at sea.I've seen more and more of them slowly but surely crop up out in Connemara,Aran Islands and along the Clare and Kerry coastline's.Its a start i suppose but more has to be done.Was'nt there that plan about 10 years ago to build a huge Wind Turbine farm off the coast of Bray on the Irish sea?Seem's like West or South coast would have been better suited.
There is a company from Spiddal which harnessed wave energy with special devices they developed.They tested them on Galway Bay a couple of years ago and won a contract to set up loads of them off the coast of Florida or the Carolina's or somewhere.More of these companies are needed and for these companies to get Irish contracts.

[Macy]

Anyhow, how have foot.ie'rs been voting so far?
The monorail.


Was'nt there that plan about 10 years ago to build a huge Wind Turbine farm off the coast of Bray on the Irish sea?Seem's like West or South coast would have been better suited.
I would think there's other issues - sea bottom, sea depth (the one off Arklow is on a sand bank, so in shallow water), close the users.

btw, I'm not sure how wind energy would've done this winter, so it has to be a mix of renewables.

btw 2 A pity movement has been snail pace at getting homes connected two ways to the grid to allow for home systems. It's the cost of the batteries which make domestic turbines uneconomic, whereas if you could sell excess back to the grid it would become viable.

[eamo1]

I take your point about this winter being calmer then normal and that a variety of energy sources are needed,we didnt have a good old fashioned Atlantic storm in January or Febuary as opposed to other years.The exceptional cold spell obviously meant it was calmer then normal.
A couple of years ago my brother and his fiancee(sp) were buying a house and looked into the possibility of buying a solar panel for the roof of the house.It costs 3,000euros but apparently saves you 300 a year on your bill so its meant to pay for itself after 10 years.They decided against it however as the sun makes only a brief appearance in Galway City for 2 weeks of the year.:rolleyes:

[peadar1987]

Ireland does lag behind other countries with reguards harnessing Wind,Solar,Wave energy.I often thought why not put a couple of hundred wind turbines along the west coast where there's a near constant wind blowing(gulf stream etc).It obviously too expensive to put them out at sea.I've seen more and more of them slowly but surely crop up out in Connemara,Aran Islands and along the Clare and Kerry coastline's.Its a start i suppose but more has to be done.Was'nt there that plan about 10 years ago to build a huge Wind Turbine farm off the coast of Bray on the Irish sea?Seem's like West or South coast would have been better suited.
There is a company from Spiddal which harnessed wave energy with special devices they developed.They tested them on Galway Bay a couple of years ago and won a contract to set up loads of them off the coast of Florida or the Carolina's or somewhere.More of these companies are needed and for these companies to get Irish contracts.

Renewables are kind of my thing. The reason I'm in Edinburgh instead of the Carlisle right now! One of the reasons is that all of the major wind turbine manufacturers are actually working at full capacity right now. It's very hard to get your hands on one of those big 5 MW (AFAIK) offshore turbines that we have on the Arklow Bank. Last thing I heard is that there is still an expansion planned. The problem with onshore wind is that a lot of people don't like it. It needs access roads built to the middle of nowhere, and high tension wires built to take the power away. At the moment, things work like a tree, big, heavy duty wires near the large power stations, Moneypoint, Ardnacrusha, Poolbeg, smaller ones going to isolated communities in the West, where the developments would take place. Water depth is a major problem for offshore turbines, which I think are going to be the future of renewables. At the moment they're pretty expensive, but the technology is developing all the time. At the moment, however, it's cheaper to get your energy from a combined cycle gas turbine. Another thing about wind power is that it's not constant. You have gusts, lulls, and days when there's no wind at all. It has to be backed up with something that can respond quickly to changes in supply and demand, and that's usually what's called pumped storage. You use the extra energy from a gust or a windy day to pump water up to a lake on top of a hill, then when you need extra power, you open a sluice, and it runs down through a turbine, releasing the energy you put in pumping it up. We have one of these at Turlough Hill in Wicklow, but for more grid integration of renewables, we'd need a lot more. Wave energy at the moment is still in its infancy. Wavebob (the company from Spiddal) have a decent device, but it has a really, really low energy density. It's going to take a long time for you to get back your investment from it. Of course, it's just a prototype, and every subsequent model will be cheaper and more efficient, but it's not ready for commercial deployment yet. I think the next big new thing is going to be tidal current power. It's completely predictable, high energy densities, and Ireland (especially the North) has a massive resource. To be honest, the main thing we can improve on is energy efficiency. I did a project a while back (for the UK, but Ireland has the same climate), where we predicted that we could save more than 25% of energy used in the country just from more efficient space heating. That's just whacking up some insulation, pushing for underfloor heating, and recycling the waste heat from our thermal power plants, and putting in geothermal heat pumps. No rocket science.

[John83]

As far as I know, it's not so much pumped storage that takes up the slack at the moment as gas turbines. We just don't have enough pumped storage to cope. I'm not sure why we haven't built more pumped storage. Maybe it's expensive or inefficient?

[peadar1987]

As far as I know, it's not so much pumped storage that takes up the slack at the moment as gas turbines. We just don't have enough pumped storage to cope. I'm not sure why we haven't built more pumped storage. Maybe it's expensive or inefficient?

It's very efficient (90%+), but it does take a lot of investment, and with cheap oil and gas during the boom years, and a complete lack of any sort of foresight from the powers that be, none was built. There's also the problem of what people are going to say when you essentially blow up a mountain they quite like to look at!

You're right about gas turbines, the Combined Cycle ones we have at the moment operate at below maximum capacity, on what's called "spinning reserve", so they can react quickly. This does, however, mean that they run at below maximum efficiency.

[Schumi]

Would this pumped storage not require a huge volume of water? My rough calculations tell me that you'd drop 1000 litres per second from 100 metres up to get just 1 MW. That sounds like an awful lot to me.

[John83]

Would this pumped storage not require a huge volume of water? My rough calculations tell me that you'd drop 1000 litres per second from 100 metres up to get just 1 MW. That sounds like an awful lot to me.
Wikipedia has Turlough Hill down as capable of generating 292MW when it's releasing water, which is about consistent with the relevent statute (http://www.irishstatutebook.ie/1968/en/si/0015.html). Naturally, the ESB site is about as much use as a particularly helpful rock.

[peadar1987]

Would this pumped storage not require a huge volume of water? My rough calculations tell me that you'd drop 1000 litres per second from 100 metres up to get just 1 MW. That sounds like an awful lot to me.

Well 1000 litres is 1 m^3, it's not too much. When you consider the lake at Turlough Hill is at a rough google maps estimate has an area of 135,500 square metres and a depth of say 10 metres, and the difference in elevation between the two lakes is almost 300m, you have some idea of the energy you can store in there.

[Spudulika]

Back in the day we went on a school tour to Turlough Hill (and Blessington) and I remember being stunned at the sheer size of the place, plus that only 2 people died in its construction (or so we were told). The one thought on all our minds that day was - what if you were swimming in the lake and got sucked into the turbines - naturally somebody asked just that question. It seemed such an excellent way of generating energy that I've been surprised ever since that a second hasn't been built.

One system that I know works on the continent, and that they were going to follow up in Tallaght, is tapping into underground rivers for (mainly) heating. A couple of towns in Germany use this method by drilling down to hit a rivers where the water is at boiling point and can be used to heat the surrounding area.

Not a plug, just an example of what is available.
http://www.renewableheating.com/geothermal_heat_pump_works.htm