"Green" policies are destroying this country

People don't object to us importing nuclear energy via the interconnector because it's not in anyone's "back yard".

Same way we are all happy to accept fracked gas by proxy - not happening in our back yard? No problem!

But datacentres using Ireland? Evil, power hogging, warehouse, don't provide ANY jobs, using all our water, they should be banned and taxed out of existence. But don't you dare tell me I have to go back to the office because the cloud platforms can't support me working from home without datacentres! And why would I cancel my Netflix and close my Twitter and TikTok accounts? And I want to be able to watch climate change videos on Youtube! And tell everyone all about how awful it is on WhatsApp!

Nuclear on our island? Dangerous! Explosive! Chernobyl! Sellafield!

More gas plants? CNG/LNG? Explore gas/oil fields around Ireland? No! Anti-green! Climate change denier! Emissions! Stranded assets!

But what do you mean I won't have mains power for a different 6-12 hour period every day? Ridiculous! Joke! Government must do something! Unacceptable!

They are much bigger than us, Chernobyl in in the north west of the country, the radiation mostly fell on the North of Ukraine and Belarus, the grain is mostly grown in the South East and East of Ukraine

Pointless as we wouldn't have a nuclear reactor up and running in less than 30 years, what are we going to do in the meantime.

With this Irish Green Party charade we will need to import practically all our food or leave the county anyway. If us culling 2 million cattle while Brazil alone raises their numbers by 24 million isn`t a awake up call on that then I don`t know what is.

Where has it taken 30 years to get planning permission ? Far as I know An Taisce went to the E.U. attempted to block planning for the U.K. Hinkley Point plant but got nowhere. Off the last 411 nuclear plants built, the mean construction time was 7.5 years.

The green industry may just be getting going, but the problem is it doesn`t know where it is going.

We ave virtually all our eggs in the basket of wind being the answer and are planning on adding more of the same. In the past year we have seen just how unreliable wind is. Green policy has shut down alternative supply sources and is planning on shutting down more, Tarbert and Moneypoint being two such plants. Even as we are, we are 100% reliant on gas when there is no wind, yet we have Corrib nearing depletion, a supply that is recognised by our own regulator and the E.U. as unsecured and the Irish greens answer is to ban exploration, attempting to ban LNG, a recognised transitional source, and do nothing about gas storage while pushing EV`s and heat pumps to further increase demand.

The only Irish Green Party plan to get to 100% renewable dependable supply is more wind turbines or storage.

From what we now know from on-shore wind that would require 12 times the capacity we actually need. Nobody it seems has priced that, but I cannot see it as other than horrendously expensive for consumers.

On storage it`s either pumped, battery or green hydrogen. No wind for extended periods like we have seen leaves pumped a negative energy source as it would take more energy to pump that water back up the hill than it would create, along with the expensive of building them which again would be bat **** crazy. Batteries at present level prices would also be the same for storage price wise, and as for green hydrogen it`s a day dream as they do not know if it will even work, when it will be an option or again how much it would cost.

As you say, green energy may be just getting going, but even the green`s haven`t a clue as to where it is going or if it will even work. You may not like nuclear, but it would provide CO2 free emissions and a dependable reliable source of energy. Without that the country is going to become a wasteland anyway.

Well then our only alternative is to start burning significant amounts more of carbon based fuel for the forseeable future...

Going to be over simplistic here but 1m EV's by 2030 means:

• Between 46,575,342KM and 65,753,425KM a day powered from the grid, based on average mileage of 17k to 24k KM a year (CCPC)
• Average EV efficiency of 20kWh/100KM, that's between 9.3GWh and 13.1GWh of additional energy a day soon to be demanded by EV's.

Let's assume we spread EV charging out evenly between 2300-0800, that's a minimum of between 1GW and 1.5GW of additional reliable, sustained, dispatchable overnight generating capacity above and beyond what we have today tonight that we'll need by 2030 - just for EV's. A 33% increase on current overnight demand.

Now home heating, 600,000 heat pumps. 6,000kWH of energy spread primarily over 6 months of the year:

• That's 33kWh or so a day, per house, during the 6 month heating season
• Collectively, that's an additional 19.7GWh of energy a day that we'll need for heating

Assume that's spread evenly over 24 hours in the day, we'll need an additional 825MW of reliable, sustained, dispatchable generating capacity 24 hours a day during the winter, above and beyond what we have today that we'll need by 2030. That's an increase of between 15% and 20% above and beyond our current daily peak demand is today.

Totting it all up, we need to plan for a minimum additional 1GW of daytime generating capacity during the day and up to 2.5GW of additional overnight generating capacity by 2030.

And that's just the simplistic "best case", since EV's don't charge evenly across the full 9 hours of the night nor do people drive the average mileage spread evenly across 365 days a year, nor do heatpumps draw power evenly throughout the 24 hour day, so the grid needs to cater for higher additional demand again to ensure sufficient overhead for unseen peaks in usage.

Now factor in we plan to remove 1.5GW of generation from the grid by 2025!

Where are we going to come up with 3.5GW of additional generating capacity by 2030? If datacentres are a major drain on our grid, and they're collectively using less than half of that amount of energy, then why the hell are we pushing EV's and heatpumps so hard at the moment, when we don't have the generation there to provide for it?

And what happens as we continue beyond 1m EV's and 600k heat pumps, what's our plan? At the moment, the only thing we can actually rely on, excluding nuclear, is carbon based fossil fuel plants. How do come up with the additional energy needed to create green hydrogen that the greens seem to be banking on?

No-one actually knows can renewables deliver the collective annual GWh hours we need to power our grid, and if it can, that we can actually capture and store it in a dispatchable manner to be released exactly when it's needed and not just when the wind is blowing, and so no-one can even hazard a guess how much it might actually cost to implement or whether we'll ever actually be able to have such a system in the first place.

That's a massive, massive gamble to be banking all of our future energy needs on.

I would wager the outlook on nuclear power in Ireland, when the average person in the street realises just how over reliant we are on wind and other renewables, will change.

I am in no way against renewables but until green storage gets sorted we are pissing in the wind. (Excuse the pun)

A few blackouts due to constrained gas will have the whole country up in arms and re examining the nuclear power question.

Agree with what your saying but a few questions:

there are the issues of nuclear waste which I presume would go to the UK and France but for how long could that be guaranteed? What would we do if they suddenly decided no we are not taking the waste after this 5 year contract ends?

What happens with security? Do we need a specialist army unit to secure the plant or would it be private?

I presume we need two plants?

Are we allowed become a nuclear power? (I presume if you have a nuclear plant you become a nuclear power? Or is that just if you have nuclear weapons?)

Who do we turn to, to build these plants? Is there much competition in this market so we don’t get done on price like the childrens hospital?

I presume it would be 100% design and build by a private company who have built many previous plants before?

Where are our uranium mines?

Where would the plant be built?

By the time the rolling blackouts start, it's a bit late in the day. We then have a minimum of 7 years to get everything fast tracked to a point where the grid is stable again. In the interim this presages an economic crisis along with whatever else is happening at the time, it means that economic development stagnates for a number of years and businesses close due to unreliable energy supply and must migrate. Data centers are working on securing their own supply.

A blackout here and there is accepted.

Widespread blackouts a few times a week for a week or two, might have a few grumbles in the neighbourhood WhatsApp groups.

Widespread blackouts a few times a week for weeks on end and you'll have several days worth of Joe Duffy show content.

Widespread blackouts for a few hours a day, daily, for weeks and months on end, with no end in sight to them, will have people in total uproar.

"The green energy industry is only getting going, the green energy storage it lagging behind that but it's getting better. We will get there".

No we won't. Storage at the levels required using any technology available today or that can be envisaged in any viable timeframe is infeasible. We need to stop talking about batteries. It's a simple calculation to work out the maximum theoretical energy density for any battery chemistry -- it's just a conversion from the molar mass of the cathode material, its oxidation state, and electronegativity. Pick any novel and potentially cheap cell chemistry, such as iron-air, and you can work out that we'll need millions of tonnes of batteries.

Look at the price of any large scale battery installation, like Tesla's Hornsdale Power Reserve in South Australia. Scaled up to ten days of current average Irish electricity demand it would cost many hundreds of billions of dollars (and would represent about 20 years worth of total battery output from Tesla's Nevada Gigafactory). Assume by some miracle we can invent some workable iron-air chemistry that is ten times cheaper than lithium -- it still doesn't work economically. (And replace iron-air with anything else, nothing changes -- battery chemistry is fundamentally limited by how many electrons can be delivered by a mole of material).

That leaves what? Hydrogen? Very difficult to handle, store, and transport. Significant energy losses involved in electrolysis, compression, and burning/fuel cell generation. Can only be burned in current gas turbines mixed in small quantities with natural gas due to the speed of its flame front. This could be fixed with a lot of time and development. Grid scale fuel cells aren't a thing, and Reuters report that it would need scaling up of fuel cell manufacturing by a factor of 500 by 2050 for it to make a dent. We are many decades away from a hydrogen economy, if ever, and it will cost a bomb.

Storage is the "hopium" of the Green masses. Don't let them BS you. It isn't coming.