"Green" policies are destroying this country

Cycle to Portugal ..... Is that what your suggesting?? Or holiday here in rip off Ireland??

How depressing this whole green agenda is really proving to be. Ordinary workers get screwed over for everything... ..

Its not really a choice though when your priced out of it. Like trying to insulate your house or get a heat pump. If you can't afford it, it's tough ****. But here's more tax on your home heating oil which makes it more unaffordable.

There you go again with the figures and comparing apples to oranges.

The contract for difference price for Hinkley is for electricity supplied over 35 yeqrs. Best case scenario for the ESB plan is €83 Bn. for the offshore construction, plus the unknown billions required for the onshore construction of hydrogen production plus hydrogen storage with the strike price being determined by those costs at the time they become operational. A strike price that will I have no doubt be also index linked for 25 years, after which time there will be another strike price that will also be index linked to cover the remaining 10 years up the 35 years to the end of the Hinkley contract for difference price.

We do not know what that strike price will be for the ESB plan, so comparing it with a price we do know for Hinkley is apples and oranges. What we do know is whatever it is as far as the consumer is concerned, it will be double because of the hydrogen element of the ESB plan, plus the cost of Hydrogen production and storage lumped on top. We also know that nuclear plants, from the bids for the Poland contracts, can be constructed for a fraction of the cost of Hinkley. But even compared to Hinkley the construction costs alone for the ESB plan would give us the same gigawatt capacity at half the price.

Financially the ESB plan makes no sense on any level.

I really do not get the logic of spending well in excess of 100 Bn. on construction alone based on a plan that we do not know if it will work or not, or even if the hydrogen element of it will be at the level required by 2030. Especially to just fit an E.U. percentages on emissions and renewables when the E.U. is green washing an energy source that produces 11 times more CO2 per year than we do to make their bookkeeping on emissions look better than they really are for the sake of their renewable percentages.

No they are not. New technologies such as smart phones (instagram, snapchat), vape shops (~200,000 people) is were the money that would have been spent on cigarettes by the previous generation have gone. Tax has a marginal effect and has made smuggling cigarettes the most profitable contraband in the country.

Lung cancer cases in Ireland set to increase substantially over the coming decade

There is a reason taxes can be so high on petrol & diesel, it is productivity. Unlike cigarettes, these products are necessary and the taxing them translates directly to the rising cost of trading goods and services. All the government does is feed inflation effects, which negatively affects peoples standard of living and those of us in the lowest income quartile get the worst impact since our purchasing power is reduced (no savings), in addition the savings rate is reduced eroding capital formation. Energy is life, and when you mess with energy, you mess with all of the systems we depend on.

One in four Britons have less than £100 savings amid fears of over growing debt in cost of living crisis

Lol 😂. I certainly won’t be using the above ( maybe the bike for exercise). Car , plane and ferries ( nothing like a Sunday drive through the snowdonia mountains) will be my mode of transportation for the forseeable future.

The anti smart meters brigade are the same types who lost their minds when the EU banned needlessly hot light bulbs and needlessly loud vacuum cleaners

How many incandescent light bulbs have been sold since the UK left the EU?

Are Dyson still selling 3000-5000 watt Hoovers?

Have you sat down and compared the new smart meter plans to traditional nightsaver plans? I can confidently say the answer is "No".

Because I have and the smart plans are more expensive compared to nightsaver plans across the board and that gap widens as we shift more of our energy onto the grid, particularly night time use like EV and battery storage.

No-one who has done the numbers could agree they make sense from a consumer point of view, unless that is to price electrical usage to the bone to reduce usage out of sheer terror of massive bills.

And the utility companies here can remotely de-energise your supply, they can put you onto pay as you go, the ESB smart meters now measure reactive power on domestic supplies (even though they don't bill for it - yet).

But, just like with everything green it is convenient to ignore the facts and numbers because that would undermine your agenda.

Far easier to just label those who do want to see and question the proposals as whackjob conspiracy theorists in the hope it will silence them or devalue their input.

Smart meters are a great idea if they work for the customer as well as the provider. The new smart tariffs are overpriced and from what I can tell don't offer the end user an API that would actually help them reduce usage. As usual, it is a good idea implemented poorly.

Pretty much it in a nut shell and it is not just for nuclear alone. For greens money is never a consideration or even who and how is going to pay for these plans until somebody mentions an alternative. Suddenly money becomes very important with only known worst case financial costs and timelines being fired around, yet mysteriously having neither financial costs or timelines for their own plans. These plans apparently are so important that money should not even be a consideration because if we do not hit percentages dictated by the great and good on such-and-such a date then we are doomed while happily ignoring that the great and good have been manipulating the figures because it allows them all to point at those figures and say "See it is working, so lets now plow on." The reality is that no matter how they fiddle the figures renewables are not even keeping pace with the rise in energy demand. That their plans also push for a rise in demand seems to have totally passed them by.

Their arguement that it is a global problem that everyone has to take responsibility for on an individual basis on the face of it sounds logical. That is until you mention that the worlds largest global emitter is not exactly helping by increasing their use of coal, you are told to go back in the corner and get back to them when the individual carbon footprint of the population of that country becomes the same as ours because of blah, blah, blah. When you mention to them that according to them it is that level of a carbon footprint that got us here in the first place, you are told to go back in the corner and scourge yourself because of the part of the planet you are living on.

Just when you think the lack of coherent answers could not getting any worse they manage to up the anti with their much admired militant wing, Just Stop Oil, where it`s not just stop oil, it`s leave all fossil fuels in the ground starting today When asked what would happen if we actually did what they are demanding, they answer is "We are all fcuked if we don`t" . When pointed out to them we are all going to be fcuked much sooner than their timeline if we do that, the only reply is "We are all fcuk if we don`t." That these people are now being asked for their position in the debate (or more accurately the only single position they have) by even some in mainline media just shows that we have gotten to the level that a coherent reply to a question, at least in the minds of greens, is no longer a requisite in any debate. It`s follow us folks and never mind the pesky questions. We know what is best for ye.

All the people who claimed to be oppressed by banning incandescent lightbulbs have LEDs in their house now, those LEDs are keeping their electricity costs much lower than they would have been.

They were wrong

Smart metres are not intended to increase people's electricity bills, they are intended to allow people to see their energy use and cut out unnecessary usage, and facilitate a modern energy grid.

It is in the interest of the fossil fuel industry to delay the transition to renewables. They support the pro-nuclear position because they know it buys them decades of business as usual

We do not have decades to spare, we need to be getting to net zero well before 2050 if we are to have any chance of avoiding 3+ degrees of global warming

Globally CO2 emissions are continuing to increase. We should already have seen annual emissions start to fall, but we've had year of far right populist monsters leading some of the worlds most powerful countries, doing everything they can to prevent action on climate change (all of them heavily funded by fossil fuels interests)