"Green" policies are destroying this country

The days are long over when we can afford to treat Greens as a bunch of harmless misguided fuddy duddies. They are now a seriously existential threat to the world economy. In particular, this sort of perniciously evil shite needs to be called out every time it is uttered:

There is no IPCC science or any credible source who claims that humans are going extinct because of climate change. That is the big fat lie used to justify Green lunacy -- "do what we say or everyone dies". It's worse than screaming "Fire" in a crowded theatre. It is a murderously irresponsible falsehood, on a par with Lysenkoism and Mao's Great Leap Forward.

This is more of the same. Renewables have been around for decades and can now be considered a fully mature technology. We are NOT on the bottom end of the sigmoid adoption curve, we are approaching the top of it. Renewables adoption is topping out in developed countries as the limits of their integrability into the grid are reached.

Even the one million EVs planned for 2030 would fully load the existing grid for eight hours overnight. That's without any other demand, let alone the heat pumps that are supposed to be keeping people warm. There won't be any time when "demand is low". 

So basically cut people and businesses off. Have you no concern or clue what that does for the economy?

Sure, highly commendable. Until you look at the cost. It would be bad enough if the Greens were merely a bunch of green-on-the-outside-red-on-the-inside Socialists. But their policies actually amount to robbing from the poor to give to the rich. This thread has had lots of guff about "the State" paying for upgrades, retrofits, and discounts on EVs. "The State" does not have any money. Every last cent comes from tax payers. The least well off can't afford retrofits. It's the puritanical Green rich who get the grants. I say this as someone who benefited from grants for a heating upgrade. I am the last person who should have been getting them as a) I needed the upgrade so would have done it anyway, b) I am extremely well off, not in need of handouts. Some poor sod paid their hard earned money so that I could voice-control Alexa to turn up the heat. That's scandalous.

One of the worst examples of Green "hopium". We are decades away from any possibility of a hydrogen economy. It suffers from serious inefficiencies and the technology doesn't exist to use it at scale. It is another Green characteristic that they trot out any old shite no matter how inefficient or economically infeasible. Energy supply companies have traditionally operated on thin profit margins. While Greens may think they can wave an invisible guiding hand over the markets, bear in mind that every innovation needs someone to fork out money up front in the expectation of turning a profit. You can't just throw away a sizable percentage of your energy output and hope to survive. That is, unless government policy rigs the market against all the other players which just leads to vastly inflated energy prices.

Are you seriously talking about Ireland here? One of the wettest countries in Europe? We have water supply issues for sure, but they are nothing to do with the availability of water. Rather they are to do with treatment and distribution infrastructure.

You still don't get it. Vast amount of excess power when the wind happens to be blowing will be all but worthless. This has already been flagged for the quantity of North Sea offshore wind that is planned. The Green assumption seems to be that there will always be a customer for excess power, and always a supplier when power is needed. There is merit to having a more widely connected network, but it has its limits. Connections to the UK and France still leaves us within the domain of mesoscale weather systems -- it's perfectly possible for all of northwestern Europe to be experiencing similar weather conditions at the same time.

Nobody seriously thinks we will build this in quantities that will make a difference.

Bugger all use in an Irish winter.

Even the SEAI sets out serious limitations in this area. Biomass is typically only economically viable where there are wastes and residues available locally. The US experience has been that once wastes find a commercial use, they are no longer "waste" but become an expensive commodity. In Ireland the SEAI sees the main growth area as being crops intentionally grown for energy production. Apart from the diversion of productive land away from food crops, it is predicated on an increase in the price of energy crops in order to be viable. As usual, Green policies depend on everything getting more expensive, which it sure as hell will.

All electrons are the same (as Wheeler and Feynman noted in 1940). Being choosy about what's pushing them around -- especially when it's technology the Greens themselves oppose -- is rank hypocrisy.

Small scale generation is not economically efficient.

Storage on the scale required in not coming. Ever.

Spare us!

Here's a thought. Go back through your list and see how many items result in actual new generation. Everything else is just extra cost -- a tonne of extra money for no new power. That can have no other possible outcome than to increase prices. And since energy underpins the price of literally everything, it's a road to ruin.

No the idea of Russia infiltrating another country wouldn't be to work on behalf of Russia but to destabilize that country. Worked well getting Trump elected !

Excellent post. This is where the rubber hits the road when you look at the actual numbers. And you are correct to call all this 'hopium'. The Greens use arguments to support their ideology but as you and many others have shown again and again, the numbers do not add up. But they refuse to accept this precisely because of their ideology. It is not a balanced set of equations but a skewed one. THIS needs to happen so THIS needs to be implemented. End of story, to save the planet from human destruction. They will use every possible argument however implausible or skewed (death of coral reeves, species extinction, polar bears) to further their agenda. Greta Thunberg and David Attenborough love/scare fest with the media and politicians in line in ignorance. Talking about a conspiracy of ignorance!

If you are skeptical you are called a denier, if you ask about the details of the supposed science 'consensus' you get frowns and no sensible answers. Skeptical scientists are not invited to the party and are rarely seen on broadstream media and are seen in line with crazy Trump supporters, anti vaxxers or that slur word 'right wing'. Politicians only get to see one side of the story and make their stances accordingly. And so on. Profoundly sad..

The EU interconnected grid idea is atrocious. It's main impetus and raison d'être is the knowledge that renewables, a consequence of the EU's ill thought and too hasty attempt to reduce CO2 output, are extremely intermittent and unreliable. Dunkelflaute can and does affect large swathes of Europe simultaneously, this happened last winter and lead to gas shortages. Russia didn't help, but the main culprit was the very low levels of gas storage which multiple countries didn't acquire, thinking they wouldn't need them because the wind would be blowing gales and because they had just installed billions of extra useless wind capacity; then the wind didn't turn up, not just in one or two countries, but across the region.

Your precious saving grace and argument cornerstone - interconnections - were of no help then and never will be. The idea would only work if multiple countries in Europe all had masses of excess baseload, preferably nuclear, but they don't and even current baseload expansion programs are only to build to each countries own needs.

Only France reacted intelligently to the Europe wide dunkelflaute crisis, which was to announce increased spending on nuclear.

The stupid Irish greens solution is bigger and fatter interconnectors in the hope some better run countries might have some to spare, because facing up to unpleasant realities is not something Ireland does. Go back a couple years and the green leaning french energy minister, Sergolene Royal, was announcing the phasedown of French Nuclear in favour of renewables, but she at least has the intelligence to see how stupid that was and now France has done a complete U-turn on nuclear vs renewables. We of course have Eamon Ryanski doubling down on refusenicking everything possible that isn't the renewables that the rest of Europe have now realised are a busted flush.

Arguing for more and better interconnectors is the Irish equivalent of turning Romanian - begging instead of working. In our case it's a refusal to build sufficient baseload for our needs, because we can't face the truth that there is only one reliable way to generate zero CO2 energy.

Your 'multiple technologies' is horse manure on the same level as suggesting that wide scale commercial fusion power plants are about to be built because some lab had a promising experiment lasting a femto second. 30 years I tell you, in just 30 years...

Irish utilities are fully state owned. The grid and water infrastructure are fully owned by public entities.

Grid this grid that and yeah EV's for everyone!!!

But what about...

Ah come off it for crying out loud. Bit of a difference between a 20p plastic bag levy and forcing people into tens of thousands of euro of debt to get their house retrofitted.