"Green" policies are destroying this country

The Celtic Interconnector is supposed to be completed by late 2025, so I was being generous by not using greens love of adding years to builds they do not like in saying 5 years.

Do you not get that there is a massive energy crisis in Europe due to a shortage of gas, or that the largest exporter of electricity in Europe is France due to their high generation from nuclear

You can have all the interconnectors you want running all over Europe,but they are not going to generate energy and right now there is little or no excess energy flowing through them and that is not going to change anytime soon, and no guarantee that there will be from this Celtic Interconnector if, or more likely, when we need it.

Contrary to green magical thinking I do not keep two sets of books. The latest solution from greens is that off shore wind is the answer. I have already shown you that depending on off shore wind for our needs will require roughly 3X the output of all the present on shore turbines, but how much this will cost or when this will be completed nobody has an answer, yet mention nuclear and greens jump in with both costs and completion dates off the top of their heads.

You talk about energy security and keeping our gas turbines running until this of shore wind solves the problems, but yet ignore we do not have energy security for this gas and that it`s at the whim of the U.K. should they decide to switch off the tap. The green`s answer to that ? Ban LNG. To talk about energy security while backing the banning of LNG shows where these two sets of mental balance sheets are really residing. In green heads.

Except that's factually incorrect

The price consumers pay for electricity is political. France choose to subsidise electricity, they add that to tax somewhere else. Ireland chooses to have low corporate tax and to make citizens pay higher costs for utilities.

Ireland produced 6.5 tonnes of CO2 per capita in 2020, France produced just over 4 tonnes. That's not double or treble or 5 times what France produced.

The technology comes when there is sufficient investment in it. If the world had started taking this seriously in the 1990s we would already have developed the lower cost higher efficiency solar panels

The Lack of investment decades ago is why we are where we are today, having to make a much more expensive transition with less time and room to manoeuvre

Good thing we listened to Christopher feckin Monckton and the ghouls at the 'Global Warming Policy Foundation' instead of every single credible scientific body on the planet.

Europe's Green Experiment. A costly failure in unilateral climate policy.

John Constable

Mr. Constable reports that the EU policies have produced the longest sustained fall in energy consumption in modern times. He ominously suggests that this could cause social instability. The report is well worth reading.

He also points out that European manufacturers have a strong lead in internal combustion engines (ICE). A rapid shift to BEVs favours China, who control control rare earths and lithium processing. Why then is the EU helping to kill its own industry? The EU trade surplus is very dependent upon Germany, and Germany is dependent upon ICE. German economic suicide will take Europe down with it.

Unrelated to the above, This graph is from the neighbours. What happens to us in the situation where the UK generators do not have spare capacity to export in the winter, and we not have the spare to sell them either?. There will be real shortages across Europe and likely a shutdown of interconnectors anywhere a country doesn’t have a surplus to offer. It is likely that industry will have to shutter under these conditions. If that starts extending to the domestic sector expect governments to fall, and the EU to get extremely fractious.

Norway at the Capacity Limit of its Power System

Where am I being disingenuous ?

You are the poster who posted here the beef herd increasing when it is in fact decreasing and has been for the last 8 years. You also claimed that the proposed cuts to farming would have little or no effect on the economy where a KPMG reports shows they would result in a 4 Billion loss in exports and result in 56,000 losing their jobs. So which of us being disingenuous!

You also throw claims around like confetti at a wedding with absolutely nothing to back them up. I did a rough estimate on how much we have to date spent on wind energy based on ourselves and Germany having close to the same figure on renewables and in relation to our population size, and from a recent post i was being very generous on those costs. From that taking into account the 12 month average rolling capacity for U.K off shore wind generation, and the output required based on that how much it would cost for off shore to fill our requirements. If you think those figures are incorrect then lets se yours.

I was also being overgenerous on off shore long term hidden costs such as maintenance as I didn`t include any. I gave the straight line depreciation costs for the manufacturers 25 year life span (again being over generous imo) plus a low interest rate of 2% for the year on year cost of those turbines, but again if you feel you can do it cheaper lets see it.

Its really not as simple as that.

EDF, Frances' nuclear power company operates 56 plants in France. Half of them are currently offline and require a lot of investment in upgrades and repairs to extend their lifespan. The company itself is in massive debt and are selling electricity at a loss because the government want to control price increases in the market

France are probably going to have to Fully Nationalise EDF, a further 10 billion euros for the privilege of taking on 47 billion euros of existing debt and large operating losses, and looking bills for expensive maintenance of aging reactors

All that money to keep utility bills low, is added on to the French national debt.

You can't simply compare bills and conclude that the French are generating electricity cheaper than other places

Germany made a mistake in shutting down their nuclear plants after Fukushima, but what is done, is done. We need to look to the future

Really?

This is a quote directly from Monbiot

"A car is now more dangerous than a gun; flying across the Atlantic is as unacceptable, in terms of its impact on human well-being, as child abuse."

The guy is a grade 1 fruitcake who thinks the apocalypse is coming tomorrow and equates flying with child abuse.

Considering your own End of Days beliefs detailed in your comments in this thread I'm not particularly surprised you're a big fan.

Yeah and I get the dig for "climate change denier" 👏

But nope. Just because you disagree with other posters here - does not make them 'deniers' regardless.

Not every green policy is well thought or even workable and not every later day green prophet should be fetted or put on a pedestal especially some of the screamers like Monbiot.

You still don't get it. Both beef and dairy cattle make up the "national herd", so beloved of the greens in their endless mission to shut down existing agriculture here and replace it with their own bizarre notions of producing "plant food". When tbf most of them wouldn't know the difference between a turnip and a swede and believe that large parts of the countryside should be reserved for nice cycling holidays to go see Eamons wolves.

The facts are - increases in the number of dairy cattle in the country has been at the expense of beef cattle numbers which have dropped significantly. The overall result is that there has been no significant overall increases in the "national herd"

Numbers have varied somewhat year on year but overall that number is still less than the maximum number of cattle (both beef and dairy) which occurred in the 1990s.

Whats less explicable - is the mindless obsession by some greens with the "national herd" as if it was the embodiment of Stalin, Hitler and Pol Pot rolled into one

The same frequently headlined with scare stories of massive increases which must be curtailed! And declared the sector with the largest share of ghgs emissions. Which frankly is green propaganda and bs.

The largest share of ghgs emissions come from Energy consumption which accounts for approx 59% of Ireland’s greenhouse gas emissions. With agriculture (which bizarrely includes forestry and other landuse change) coming in at approximately 34%.  

Yes Irish agriculture faces challenges. However the greens sticking their oar in is certainly not going to help.

Define 'massive'. Irelands methane emissions in 2012 were the same as in 1990, according to the world bank. Why they don't have more recent data, I have no idea.

I take it you are addressing that post to me.

There are two national herds. The beef herd and the dairy herd so why don`t you for once go and do a bit of research on where these proposed cuts are to be made and to what degree rather than just throwing around thoughts off the top of your head like you have been doing on the economy and on beef cattle increasing in numbers when they have been decreasing for the past 8 years.

While you are at it might not be a bad idea also to check out just what body incentivised Irish farmers to increase their dairy herds and why. Checking out what the E.U. Agriculture Minister had to say 2 months ago on cattle numbers might not be a bad idea either rather than jumping in with accusations of a poster being disingenuous when you yourself hasn`t the first clue as too what you are talking about.

So his personal intervention against Shannon LNG, his department's footdragging on permitting existing offshore exploration licenses, and his misrepresentation of those projects to a Seanad committee are "nuthin' to do with me guv"? Right.

Oh I don’t know………maybe to have security of supply?

At this point as individuals we have to be prepared in advance for the 2022-23 Winter season i.e. From November to April in Ireland we can expect mean daily temperatures to vary from 4.0 °C to 7.6 °C, we will need heating and it is substantially expensive this year compared with previous years. If we are unlucky and get severe cold weather, this can last anywhere from 2 weeks to 2 months (e.g. 1962-63) and will impact the United Kingdom and much of Europe at the same time. Compared to events like March 2018, where we just scraped through thanks to gas storage in Kinsale, that's been decommissioned. Excess winter deaths rose significantly in Ireland that year. For Winter 2022/23 there is no reserve energy capacity in the system to cope with am extended severe cold weather event.

• Winter clothing and warm bedding will be essential, most people will be turning down thermostats to manage the bills.
• Household energy consumption will need to be monitored carefully, find activities that limit running up the electricity bill.
• Rolling blackouts are an increased possibility, that means almost all modern heating systems are down for the duration. More remote areas tend to have contingencies in place, urban areas not so much. Beware diesel generators are notoriously problematic during cold weather.
• If houses need to be abandoned in severe cold (e.g. move in with relatives/neighbours) ensure the water tanks are drained, you should know how to turn off the water in those cases.