Energy infrastructure

Because electricity is paid at whoever is the most expensive producer day by day. So wind turbine generators are paid exactly the same per megawatt hour of energy as those producing using gas, oil or coal. Since gas pricing has gone through the roof and most of our generation capacity relies on gas the wind, oil and coal generators are creaming it.

SSE Airtricity are 100% green right?

Their sister company, SSE Thermal, owns more generation capacity in fossil fired stations in Ireland than SSE do as a whole in wind generation (~700MW):

600MW Tarbert thermal and gas turbine station, part gas, most heavy oil.

460MW Great Island gas fired gas turbine plant in Wexford.

120MW Rhode oil fired gas turbine peaker plant in Offaly.

104MW Tawnaghmore oil fired gas turbine peaker plant in Mayo.

How they call themselves green is once you can tally up how much wind you inject into the grid over a set period of time, say a year, or purchase enough power from wind generators wholesale, then subtract the amount of energy you retail to customers within that same period of time, if the balance is positive, voila - you're 100% green!

Only 14.8% of the hours in a year are of direct sunshine. When panels are shaded by cloud, their output drops 75-90%. 70% of daylight hours in Ireland are cloudy. This is one of the worst countries you could imagine for solar. The loud whosh, whosh noise of wind turbines means most people would not actually want their neighbour to put one up and wouldn't want one themselves, either, unless they were deaf.

Intermittent energy sources got us into this mess and they are not the answer to getting us out of it.

Currently wind is providing 3.9% of our energy needs and it's cloudy. People who think more of the same uselessness is the answer, are delusional. Unfortunately such a person, an ex used bicycle salesman no less, has a couple of the most important and relevant government portfolios at the moment. I predict he won't have those portfolios much longer and if the predicted blackouts occur, he's going to need 24/7 armed protection.

It would still take a nice chunk out of our gas consumption if we had a couple GW of solar installed but really we would need more storage and more interconnectors to go with it.

I doubt yer man who you mentioned will need any armed protection because we just put up with politicians no matter what they do to us. Back during the recession the best they can come up with was "lets make all those silly normal people pay us every year so they can continue to live in their own house" people had their bit of a moan on Joe Duffy and have been happily paying to live in their own houses ever since. It must be a hang over from colonial times that we put up with this amount of sh1t. If one of the government ministers visits some town in the backarse of nowhere you'll see people lining up on the street in awe for the chance to shake his hand and plámás him regardless of the misery he is inflicting on those very same people.

What do you think this chart would like after serious power cuts this winter?

https://www.thejournal.ie/do-you-think-the-ban-on-nuclear-power-should-be-lifted-1462248-May2014/

Happily, right after I announce that a yes vote gets them free electricity for 20 years. For those that voted yes, that is.

I'm not so sure... if Putin starts squeezing the EU by playing with NS1 things will could get ugly very quickly.

German gas storage has been refilled in no small part due to gas imports from Russia. If NS is shut down fully this year or next, it will make refilling for the following winter that much harder.

Its not the end of the world but its far from business as usual - despite the storage rates there are still pushing massive cutbacks to energy and gas usage across Germany. Germany desperately need an alternate supply of gas - is there enough LNG supply in the market to cover them if Russia cut them off?