[hinkley]

That makes it worse! A euro is worth about 10% more than a dollar.

Ireland has a lot of oil in their power mix from what I'm seeing, so that makes a bit of sense.

Maybe the high power cost is why they're deploying ~600GWh of new wind capacity per year for the last 15 years. Because at those rates the wholesale prices should be able to subsidize a lot of loans.

[hunterpayne]

We don't measure capacity in GWh, we measure it in GW. And if Ireland had 600GW of wind, their entire island would be surrounded by a forest of windmills. Also, Ireland lacks any energy storage so none of that wind can be used for baseload, only variable load.

[hinkley]

> We don't measure capacity in GWh

I cannot even express how much hatred I have for bad charts, and getting tricked by one anyway when I go in already expecting it to be lying to me is incandescently indescribable.

On Wikipedia there's a very progressive-looking chart that is measuring in TWh/year and going up up up. And as you say,

>Ireland lacks any energy storage so none of that wind can be used for baseload

You always measure baseload in GW or if you're fancy, TW.

So what that chart is really saying is that Wind is adding on average about 70 KW of capacity per year, when amortized over 24 hours. Which is probably on the order of an additional .3GW of capacity per year when the sun is shining and bupkis the rest of the time.

Although given how overcast that region is, maybe measuring solar in TWh/year is a bit excusable, and then they end up measuring everything else that way?

[rsynnott]

Ireland doesn't use oil for generation these days; the last oil plant closed a while back. We use a lot of _gas_, which is under a lot of price pressure at the moment.