"Green" policies are destroying this country

6 months. Not the answer you wanted, but suck it up. https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/germany-says-fifth-floating-lng-terminal-be-built-by-end-2022-2022-07-19/

Kinnsale for used for that purpose until 2017

You may recall December 2010 was cold. (temperatures recorded of -18C)

No sign of breakage there for fossil fuel plants.

Seeing that figure for renewables is made up of hydro., solar and wind the turbines might as well be broken.

You see what the UK did with building regulations part L (Conservation of Fuel and Energy – Dwellings)? Ireland generally follows.

apparently they want us all to use heat pumps which use 46% more electricity which as we all know is getting cheaper by the day .....

how soon can we get these wealthy elitists who have no regard for ordinary citizens out

There is no easy solution. I have plenty of ideas but society can only do things that are both economically feasible and politically acceptable. Right now there is a jarring disconnect between those two aims. I don't think anything is going to happen until we get jolted back to reality, which may or may not happen.

However, I can certainly tell you what I think is not going to happen -- renewable energy nirvana by 2050. Here is a picture of how fossil fuel use has developed since 1800:

I think humans have a hard time getting their heads around the concept of exponential growth. It's not intuitive, even to the mathematically inclined. You look at the graph above and think we've created a big problem for ourselves in the last 70 years since 1950. Not true. Fossil use has been growing exponentially since 1800. Here's an exponential function divorced from any real-world connection but with a similar timeline and growth rate:

This also looks like it goes nuts in the last 70 years. Yet the whole thing is a perfectly smooth exponential curve with just a piddling 1.6% growth per annum. In 220 years it grows by a factor of more than thirty.

Note that in the primary energy graph earlier, the absolute amount of "traditional biomass" which dominated energy consumption pre-1800 did not decrease. It went up. That's something to bear in mind when considering energy use going forward and the rapid growth of renewables. Yes, they are growing exponentially, but they are barely making a dent as a proportion of all energy consumption. Twenty years ago, 85% of all energy globally came from fossils, and it's pretty much the same today.

Global oil consumption has been increasing pretty much exponentially at 1.5% annual growth for decades. Natural gas consumption is growing even quicker. Of any endeavour, the latter is responsible for the biggest reduction in CO2 emissions so far, since it has displaced a lot of coal. Coal use peaked in 2014 ... until last year when it increased again and nearly hit previous highs. Among the world's top ten coal consumers, Germany had the biggest percentage increase in coal use last year. This year will almost certainly see another increase.

I also note that hydropower has long been the biggest component of the renewable sector, but it is not going to massively increase in future. Some resources are inherently limited by physics and geography. I believe the same is true of wind and solar. Those resources have a very uneven geographical spread. It may come as a shock to those of us with a maritime climate, but the interiors of continents tend to be dominated by big lazy high pressure systems. And the best solar resources are not all close to the places with highest energy demand.

With all that in mind, let's look at one organisation's projections for how we get to carbon neutral by 2050 (just by-the-by, this is from 2017 and the same crowd predicted EVs to be cheaper than ICEs by 2022 ... fail):

So first of all, this is only electricity generation. They have it more than doubling from 2020 to 2050 which is in line with IEA projections. But we probably need to do way better than that if the Green vision of electrifying transport, industry and heating is to come to pass. So I don't think this is realistic even on its own terms.

But then look at the growth of wind and solar. By my quick calculation it is a sustained growth rate of 10% annually for 30 years. That is unprecedented in the history of energy infrastructure, to say the least. Even though I readily admit that solar power has achieved that rate of growth for a couple of years, I believe it is extremely unrealistic in the long term, bordering on preposterous. Overall renewables growth in the USA from 2010 to 2020, for example, was a much more sedate (though still impressive) 3.5%. And again, there's that exponential growth conundrum -- if you do 3.5% growth instead of 10% for 30 years you miss your target by a factor of more than six.

There are other headwinds. This happy Green path assumes that renewable power will be a low-cost nirvana whereby we all wave goodbye to fossils with minimum disruption. There are at least two reasons why that's unlikely to be the case: the cost of inputs, and unreliability.

Unfriendly government policies toward fossil fuel industries, subsidies for renewables, and corporate ESG, are having a predictably deleterious effect. Globally we have underinvested in fossil fuel extraction by a trillion dollars over the past several years.

Fossil fuels do not grow on trees. Twenty years ago we had predictions of armageddon and global population die-off because we had hit "Peak Oil". Energy extraction from unconventional sources -- deepwater and shale oil and gas -- is monumentally expensive. It has been sustained by incredible (and incredibly expensive) advances in technology. The public doesn't get to hear about them because they are unfashionable. That is worrying, since our entire way of life fundamentally depends on them for the time being.

And so, when you see the above graph showing a steep decline in fossil fuel use, you have to ask whether renewables can take up the slack where traditionally cheap sources of energy have left off. The overwhelming evidence so far is that they cannot. Nowhere in the world that has increased renewable energy use has seen falling energy prices. And as underinvestment in fossils pushes their cost up, the evidence is that renewables increase in cost at the same time.

That's not hard to understand. Renewables are extremely wasteful of many commodities compared to fossils. Just looking at copper alone, renewables use between four and fourteen times as much for the equivalent fossil-based energy generation (with the high end being for the "desirable" goals of solar and offshore wind). We needn't recite the list of other commodities -- neodymium, praseodymium etc. -- that's well covered elsewhere. Does anyone honestly think that renewables are not going to hit their own resource bottlenecks in the next 30 years? Especially when the fossil fuels that power extractive industries are being wound down?

Then we get to unreliability. I've banged on about this elsewhere so I won't rehearse it again. Truly grid-scale energy storage is not coming. Full stop.

So, this is all a very longwinded way of saying that wind and solar aren't on my list of solutions to climate change. As I said, you have to rule out the impossible "solutions" before you decide what other more realistic options you have. Right now, Green policies have so captured the public mindset that I think we are locked into a self-destructive spiral for the foreseeable future. I don't think we're going to change tack until we have seen those policies fail decisively. We will be in a world of hurt by then, but at least we can start to pick up the pieces. I hope that will happen before Green policies have killed millions, if not tens of millions, of people.

By the way, I don't think there's any way of completely overhauling our energy infrastructure in 30 years regardless of technology -- it's taken a hundred years to build it, it will take the same again to replace it. Right now we are wasting time going in the wrong direction.

I really didn’t think this idiot could be any more divorced from reality. The costs involved of changing from gas to heat pump with all the extra insulation etc are going to be astronomical to make it function properly.

We are already running into electricity generation issues and he seems to be hell bent on exacerbating the issue.

The man is an idiot not fit for office when he can’t see the wood from the trees.

To an extent you can argue that, however, this crisis as a result of the effects of the energy policy over the past decade have been in the works for some time, some people anticipated the crisis to hit after 2025. The EU response to the Russian invasion has bought forward that time-line.

1. Politicians across the EU are committed to increasing the price of fossil fuels, by a ratcheting mechanism. The signed off on this in 2015 (Enda Kenny government - Paris agreement). They were not expecting the prices to go vertical so quickly.
2. The bankers and brokers expect to make a fortune on carbon emissions trading, It is no coincidence that a central banker like Mark Carney is heavily involved as are others under the banner of ESG.
3. Politicians across the EU set policy that their citizens (or subjects) be forced from consuming primary sources (Oil, Coal & gas) to secondary source (electricity).
4. Politicians in Ireland banned nuclear generation in Ireland since 1999, Germany (Angela Merkel) began the process of phasing theirs out in 2011 and are down to their last 3. Where do we go for baseload power?
5. Each country in the EU (and the UK) pursues the same policy of closing down their fossil fuel plants (mainly coal) and removing their reserve generation capacity, instead depending on inter-connectors from any country that has surplus generation to make up any shortfalls. What happens when all the reserve generation is gone?
6. In Ireland the politicians have set the target of 70% electricity generation by "renewables" by 2030 which simultaneously increasing the load by EVs and heat exchanges. They have been warned of the risks since 2017 and ignored it.
7. By 2025 Corrib gas will be in decline, current Tarbert and Moneypoint generation will be shut-down ( that was the plan - if they dare in the current circumstance)

Bottom line, Irelands electrical grid is destined to encounter major stability problems based on the trajectory of the policies enacted and pursued by successive governments who collectively got hooked on hopium and ignored the engineers.

The proposed plant in Gort will also come with its own distinct odour.

NIMBYs aside. The main issue with most of them is economics. The raw material must be produced near the plant (transport costs), the material needs to have a low moisture content before it can be burned, a problem people who experimented with growing Miscanthus grass ran into. As a consequence most of the material burned is timber, sawdust, offcuts etc. The biggest biomass plant in the UK (DRAX) imports wood from the United States. there was a plan to do the same in Mayo (Enda Kennys constituency) years ago but the operator went bankrupt.

He is incorrect, the combination of fascism and woke-ism is in plain sight under the corporate moniker of Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG), or should that be Extreme Shortages Guaranteed (ESG) in relation to the supply of gas.