"Green" policies are destroying this country

Good twitter account showing the source of our energy generation every 24 hours

We should increase our renewables, but will still need the EXACT same amount of backup for when the renewables can't meet demand.

Currently our backup is gas. Some of our gas comes from Norway I thought via the UK. They have an agreement to prioritise the EU over the UK in the event of shortages (thank you Brexit). Not good for us as we're on the UK line and they'd be crafty enough to close that pipe. Like can ya see the UK going without gas and letting it pass through the UK over to us?

Battery storage is not financially viable yet. Ideally, every home would have solar panels or small turbines connected to batteries and the house runs from the batteries. They are topped up from the grid when required.

The smart grid dashboard used to be a lot better 5-10 years ago. They are after removing a lot of useful information & graphs from it

Looks like today is particularly dismal. If we had say, a jiggawatt or two of solar the renewable generation would be a far bigger chunk but we still wouldn't be out of the woods

I was just wondering that. How many of our hydro electricity generation plants are running at capacity atm?

Shannon, Inniscara etc

The one thing of course they don't have, which we do, is our own natural gas resources. Correction. Thats is - we will have at least until our present gas finds are finished. As the greens here took it on themselves to bury any potential extraction of natural gas forever.

Germany is also at the planning stage of building two liquefied natural gas terminals (mainly in an effort to reduce dependence on Russian gas) With our geniuses repeatedly axing every possible LNG terminal development here. And that's with us already at the end of the UK natural gas pipeline.

Eitherway competition for natural gas in Europe is going to go through the roof. As is the price. Things could get very interesting here I reckon.

I don't think anyone is arguing here that we get more renewables on the go. Sure it makes sense. Nevertheless, we still need the backup. And wouldn't it be great of the backup we need could be our own gas. More renewables would leave the gas reserves in the ground longer as we wouldn't need as much. It would last longer as the backup. No matter what way you cut it, we need the backup. At the minute gas is the only backup we have and we're dependent on mad lads to keep it flowing.

I'd see no reason not to issue licences for exploration. At least we'd bloody know what's there and make decisions based on that, in conjunction with ramping up wind/sun/water renewables and microgeneration too.

We need an election to sort this out: let the various parties put up their energy strategies and let the public decide what is the pragmatic solution balanced against climate needs balanced against what other states are doing.

Did you miss the bit again where you agreed that natural gas was essential for the transition to renewable energy generation? Or you've completely forgotten again?

And beyond that natural gas is essential for helping stabilise the inherent problems of renewable energy generation reliability. And that's not going to go away regardless of how many renewable enegy installations are thrown into the mix

I swear to doge this thread is like kindergarten all over again with endless circle games the kids can't get enough of .

Yes if and when we find more gas fields we use them. There's nothing complicated about that other than the eejits in government having put the kibosh on it.

Hopefully as soon as the greens get turfed out of government that will be fixed

No it doesn't work that simply I'm afraid

In Europe electricity prices are pegged to the dearest energy component in any given mix of energy generation.

So it doesn't matter if you use 1% or 99% renewables and the remainder other - all units of energy produced are priced exactly the same.

Use more renewables? No that doesn't help. Other countries in Europe with higher percentages of renewables than us have even higher electricity prices. Go figure.

Of course non renewables are being taxed to make them as expensive as possible whilst renewables are subsidised so thats not helping either

And with Renewable energy, the peaks and troughs of generation requires the use of a stable means of generation such as natural gas. And that's not going away for the foreseeable future.

ESS have just announced expansion into the EU.

They produce grid scale batteries that use Iron oxides to store energy long term and can be deployed at any scale, from industrial, to grid scale

This is exactly the kinds of technology that will balance the grid in the era of renewable energy. There will be times when wind and solar generation will far outstrip demand, so these massive batteries will charge themselves using surplus renewable energy (providing an income to the renewable energy company) When renewables are not sufficient to meet demand, these batteries come online and release energy into the grid as they are needed.

Large energy intensive industry will likely have their own batteries because even small savings in powering themselves from off peak energy will result in large savings for their operations

These batteries do not need any rare metals and are 100% recyclable

The energy market will adapt, and energy itself will become the commodity that is traded instead of Coal, Oil and gas (that is currently shipped around the world occasionally spilling into the ocean and devastating entire coastlines)

As we make more efficient use of our energy generation capacity, (which is going to be much higher than the peak demand) it will allow us to use that excess energy to do things like desalinate water, smelt iron, create hydrogen from sea water etc)

The people on this thread banging on about our eternal reliance on gas, will look like the people who thought computers would never take off 40 years ago.

If the fossil fuel companies hadn't been actively corrupting the global political system, we'd be much farther ahead than we are now.

Firstly, rather than attempting to have your accusations ignored by deflecting, are you man/woman enough to now admit that the "we" I mentioned was anything other than the state, and had nothing to do with the proposal by a private company to build and operate a LNG terminal in Kerry ?

Secondly for someone that knows so little about LNG that they believed if we did build our own terminal the only company we could buy LNG from was the one applying to build their own terminal in Kerry, to lecture anyone on reading up on the topic shows that whatever else you may be you`re not short on neck.

That neck doesn`t get any leaner or shorter when it appears that despite your lecturing to others, you cannot manage simple subtraction.

From your own post just yesterday. Renewable electricity accounted for 69% of all renewable energy used in 2020, up from two thirds (66.8%) in 2019. Where in that are you finding this 80+% electricity from fossil fuels ?

Even more interestingly, why do you keep attempting to avoid the question that with such a high percentage of renewables that we were being told would provide us with cheaper electricity, we were the 4th most expensive in the E.U. even before the recent price hikes for natural gas. ? That could be that perhaps you need more time to read up on the topic. If it is, and its any help you could start by reading up on the pricing policy that has been in the past cheered on here by greens. A policy that even the E.U. now sees for the folly it is having recently proposed windfall taxes.