Energy infrastructure

presumably "heat pumps and insulation" were a single item.

Plenty of houses cannot be retrofitted to good enough standard to suit heat pumps - you would basically have to tear down and rebuild. And as for insulation, plenty of older houses neither have the room for internal insulation, nor do they have a cavity suitable to fill.

One with metre thick stone walls and no prospect of retrofitting an insulated slab. I have such a beast. This would be why historic buildings are specifically excluded from needing a BER cert. It's not an answer to be a smart arse and say it's 'technically' possible, it has to be realistically affordable by someone who hasn't got taxpayers funds to spend.

No coal, no lignite, no nuclear - no problems there that I can see. /s

The capacity is meaningless in this couuntry. Only 15% of the hours in a year are direct sunshine, and of that, only the ones in summer would give you capacity level delivery. 70% of Irish daylight hours are cloud covered, which means in summer, you only get 20% of the rated output. In winter it's even less. So the real world capacity assuming an 18% annualized average cloud generation - I make it an average of 115 Kw per hour over a year if it's really 540 MW capacity, as that link suggests.

What?

"As a general guide, one megawatt (MW) of Solar PV panels will typically require a net area of 2 hectares...approximately 1,079 hectares"

I make that about 540 MW. How do you get 1-1.5 GW?

For a bog-based solar farm, will there be foundations and access roads needed? Similar to those for a wind farm but on a smaller scale.

I would expect that all panels need to be accessible by some sort of vehicle for maintenance ?

For every 1GW of theoretical capacity in this country, how much is actually achieved as an average across the year?

Is this recorded data available from any of the commercial solar farms already in the country?

I calculate it at 42.6% of stated capacity if you only allow for daylight hours in a year, but only 21.3% if you are comparing the capacity to a reliable 24/7 source like gas, coal or nukes, given they generate nothing at night.

That's assuming a generous 100% of capacity during sunlight hours - which implies tracking - and 18% for cloudy hours - based on Boadsie solar production figures.

Sunshine comprises 15% of the hours in a year, so you have to be joking. Solar falls off the grid everytime clouds blow in. Storage doesn't exist - no country has grid scale long term hydrogen storage, despite your repeated and erroneous attempts at suggesting the technology is there and that existing infrastructure for NG will work for H2. Interconnectors are not a reliable plank in a nations energy infrastructure due their susceptibility to politics and external technical disruptions. If the other end of the interconnector is having it's own energy shortgae, there won't be any coming from there.

Anti nuke countries in Europe are now arguing with the IPCC and IEA and UN. It would be hard to make up this nonsense.

The IPCC have caused a global panic about CO2 because countries trust it, but the same organisation is considered to by untrustworthy in it's pro-nuclear views.

"Global climate objectives fall short without nuclear power in the mix: UNECE

The urgent need to reduce emissions and slow global heating, should involve the roll-out of more nuclear power stations, regional UN energy experts argued in a new briefing on Wednesday.

...

The UNECE document also highlighted a 2018 report by the IPCC which sees demand for nuclear generation increase six times by 2050 with the technology providing 25% of global electricity."

https://news.un.org/en/story/2021/08/1097572

On the one hand, Greens believe the IPCC pronouncements, hook line and sinker, yet when the same supposedly authoratative body and it's UN siblings state nuclear needs to be included in the effort to reduce greenhouse gases, they no longer believe what is being said. Logic was never a strong point with greens.