"Green" policies are destroying this country

Not a hope of reducing our usage - if anything it will increase sharply in coming years.

Elsewhere the government are targetting 30,000 homes a year for the next 2-3 years minimum (another target they are unlikely to come within an asses roar of achieving but let's run with it anyway).

Govt targets = 90,000 homes is what we needed.

That's 90,000 homes with a typical estimated annual consumption according to the CRU of 4,200kWh of electricity.

These homes will all be A rated so will have heatpumps - another 3,000kWh of electrical consumption a year.

Let's assume 10% of these homes have an EV - if they do the average annual mileage (17,000KM) in an average efficiency EV (15kWh/100KM) then that's another 2,500kWh of electricity.

All in, that's another 648GWh of annual electrical baseload consumption we need to account for just the homes, plus another 23GWh for the 10% of those homes with an EV (9,000 EVs). That's just shy of 0.7TWh of extra energy needed just to solve our housing crisis.

Before any of the 1mn existing ICE-EVs are transitioned or 600k heatpump retrofits are factored in or additional datacentres are brought online.

Like you say - not a hope.

William Reville, the well known anti-science, anti-climate change, pro turf burning, pro baby seal killing Professor (for the "Greens", this is sarcasm) has this published today in the Irish Times -

We need to take the nuclear option

There is pretty much universal agreement in mainline science that global warming poses a deadly threat to humanity and that we must drastically and quickly reduce and then stop burning fossil fuel. The two big non-climate-warming power generation alternatives to burning fossil fuel to release the energy needed to run our societies are wind and solar.

But we also know that the sum of wind plus solar power still leaves us with a shortfall of energy, because both wind strength and solar intensity are erratic. This shortfall is currently met by burning fossil fuels. We hope technological developments will allow us to store excess energy generated when strong winds blow and sunlight is intense, to be used at times when winds fail and/or sunlight is dim.

But we already have access to stable, safe power that doesn’t rely on burning fossil fuel – nuclear power.

This should be good news but, despite our enthusiasm for producing doomsday predictions about climate change, little enthusiasm is shown for recruiting nuclear power to supplement wind and solar power to eliminate our dependence on fossil fuels.

Incidentally, Ireland has a close connection with nuclear power through the work of Irish scientist Ernest Walton (1903-1995). Walton, with John Cockroft, split the nucleus of an atom (nuclear fission) at Cambridge University in 1932. Nuclear fission is the basis for nuclear power. Walton and Cockroft were jointly awarded the Nobel Prize in physics in 1951. Until 2015, when Donegal-born William Campbell was awarded the Nobel Prize in physiology or medicine, Walton was Ireland’s only Nobel prizewinner in science.

The nuclear power industry traditionally built large nuclear reactors, each big enough to supply the electrical requirements of a city of several hundred thousand inhabitants. Each such reactor is specifically designed for its particular role, costs billions of euro, and takes many years to build, with progress bedevilled by objections and delays.

Many environmentalists highlight dangers posed by the long-lived radioactive waste produced by nuclear power. But this danger is often greatly exaggerated as I explained in a previous column. Also, the general public fears nuclear power despite the fact that the nuclear industry has the best safety record of all means of generating electricity. All these factors conspire to intimidate politicians into endlessly postponing the decision to expand nuclear power.

Recent developments in the nuclear power industry allow small modular reactors (SMRs) to be mass-produced at relatively low cost and deployed quickly and safely, making the nuclear option more attractive. The American Nuclear Regulatory Commission recently certified the SMR design for use.

SMRs are mass-produced in factories and then moved to their site of use. They are simple, less expensive, easier to license and operate safely and less susceptible to serious accidents than the traditional large reactors. Additional SMR units can be easily added to increase capacity if required, for example if new industries moved into the area.

SMR design is new but the concept is not. The US navy has built more than 200 submarine nuclear reactors, most mass-produced in the same manner as the recently certified SMRs, and with no meltdowns or severe accidents.

The navy experience proves that small mass-produced nuclear reactors can be produced and operated safely. Ireland doesn’t need to build traditional large and super-expensive nuclear reactors. SMRs would suit and could be relatively quickly installed.

But endlessly harping on about small risks of nuclear simply makes the ideal the enemy of the good. All means of generating electricity have disadvantages – look where burning fossil fuels got us – but the advantages of modern nuclear power swamp the relatively small disadvantages. If we really believe what we proclaim about the catastrophic consequences of a runaway global warming, then we must act with urgent pragmatism.

Starting up nuclear power in Ireland would greatly help us to meet our greenhouse gas emission targets. In the absence of nuclear power we will depend on burning gas, mostly imported, to generate electricity to supplement wind and solar power for the next 30 years. Nuclear power could save our bacon but if we delay much longer, even that option will be too late to bail us out.

William Reville is an emeritus professor of biochemistry at UCC

"In today’s world, batteries can be used to delay the use of solar electricity for at most a few hours. In exceptional situations, perhaps the holding period can be increased to a few days."

Another green dream of some super storage to which we can depend is to put it mildly impossible to achieve for a very long time.

Kildare P's post above is excellent and just the level of realism that people need to have.

A fast growing economy and population is never going to see a reduction in energy consumption. Yes, renewables are one of the suite of solutions as we go forward, but in the meantime it is incumbent on the Government to use any and facilities on the island to generate power that is plentiful enough and at a digestible price for consumers, even if that means bringing coal and peat back up to full capacity for the time being.

And the Government needn't be laying the guilt trip on ordinary people about it either. Its the fault of successive Government's policies over the last 20 years that has brought us to where we are, not just in energy generation but in the near unchecked development of massive commercial consumers.

The snowballing energy crisis we are in really does eclipse Housing or Health as the most serious issue facing the Country, as it has the potential to paralyse across the board.

A discussion on the continuing disaster that is Germany's Energiewende. Documents how the remaining nuclear plants are still being shut down in favour of continued burning of lignite. Includes eye-openers like Vice Chancellor Robert Habeck (who is also Federal Minister for Economic Affairs and Climate Action) going to Qatar to beg for emergency supplies of LNG but then turning them down when the Qataris wanted a 20 year supply contract (shades of Eamon Ryan there, committing to the absolute bare minimum of fossil fuel requirements).

It descends into pure farce (starting at 43:45) with Germany seeking to buy 0.5 million tonnes of hydrogen annually from Canada, in the form of ammonia. The energy required is the equivalent of Canada's entire wind power capacity. Canada suggested using some nuclear electrons from a New Brunswick CANDU reactor, but German environmentalists insisted this would scupper the deal. If used for power generation in Germany, the hydrogen would yield about one fifth of the electricity used to make it in Canada. It would also be the equivalent of just one of the nukes being shut down in Germany in the prime of its life, though vastly more expensive.

Sounds a lot like Ireland, with the German Greens continuing to push their unworkable ideological agenda while German industry faces an existential crisis. Note, this was made just before the sabotage of the NordStream pipelines, and sounds like there was quite strong support in Germany for lifting sanctions on Russia in order to ease the energy crisis. I wonder if this played into the saboteur's motivation to close off this option. (My working hypothesis is still that the Yanks are the most likely culprit).

I don't know much about it, but am I right in thinking the conspicuous channels and ditches in the following photo are for drainage to prevent turbine foundations from being undermined? Is it the case that peatland gets drained for wind farms, but farmers are going to be forced to rewet areas they have farmed for decades?

And true to form, rather than address valid issues raised, resort back to doom and gloom statements and accuse those raising said issues of being pro-pollution, overly sensitive and other such nonsense.

Tell me - are you pro-devastation, prepared to see Western civilisation as we know it, and civilisation that the developing world are aspiring to, brought to its knees by the unproven, uncosted and badly thought out plans to bank our future energy needs solely and exclusively on renewable energy?

Happy to see people die in their homes from the cold?

Prepared to see elderly and vulnerable cut off because they have no electricity, fumbling around in the dark of night, with cordless phones and mobiles that have no battery or no signal, and no way of calling for help in the pitch black?

Wait hours for an ambulance that doesn't show because they've electrified the fleet and because of widespread power outages due to a calm, cold period, they haven't been able to charge the ambulance fleet up to make it there and back to you?

Maybe that part of the SWOT analysis can be put in the next green manifesto - oh wait, it would seem they haven't even done one to begin with judging by how it's all panning out in reality and the green response to why it's going wrong...

See - we can all come up with doom and gloom scenarios, that's easy.

Coming up with actual, verifiable, provable and workable solutions, that's not so easy!

What's it going to cost and where are these solar 'parks'? Go on name them. Given Egypt just signed contracts with both Russia and Korea to build a large NPP I'm calling BS on this project.

All that solar potential and they are goimg for a NPP. Smart move of course.

Isn't he the lad who wants us to actually increase our electricity usage through the push to heat pumps and EVs? Some neck as you say.

Things are not looking good this winter, get the candles ready folks if the greens have'nt taxed them😀,can I take it that ER will resign if we have power cuts, after all we are told he is an honourable man and will do the right thing or will he blame everything and everyone else for his shortcomings, this would be the first power cuts since the dark days of the oil crisis in the 70's, this would rank as an abject policy failure from the greens and should also trigger an election.Its unbelievable that this country is in such a mess energy wise when a schoolkid could have foreseen/rectified the situation.

https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/irelands-risk-energy-shortfalls-rising-grid-operator-2022-10-06/

Apparently they actually did raise the tax on some candles in the last few weeks!

Crazy as it sounds you are correct.

Since January 1st the V.A.T. rate on white and cylindrical candle is 23%. Prior to that it was zero.

A slightly worrying snippet from your link:

Unfortunately the UK is saying something very similar:

Then you go and look at France:

What about Germany?

Seems an awful lot of countries are saying "there's nothing to worry about as long as the neighbours don't let us down".