"Green" policies are destroying this country

100%. There is a supply chain crunch coming on offshore installation.

Turbine manufacturers are claiming they are losing money on each sale, so prices will have to go up.

There aren't close to enough production plants, survey vessels, installation vessels or experienced crew to come close to meeting global 2030 targets, so simple supply and demand will see prices rise in an effective bidding war to whoever will pay the highest bid price.

Prices are most certainly not on the downward trend.

Possibly but if we want some sort of gas storage- which personally I think is a good idea- we should rebuild that infrastructure.

Why do you keep turning this into an exclusive all or nothing?

You use your 2 nuclear plants as baseload, alongside a sensible amount of wind, solar and interconnection. Not in place of.

Just like we don't have two Moneypoints, Tarberts or Huntstowns and we've never had a total lights out scenario.

When the time comes to replace them, yes. Which in all likelihood, is going to be a lot further away than the current offshore wind plan.

And unlike the offshore wind equivalent, there's every chance those plants will have directly produced over double the amount of electricity in that time.

There isn't enough copper (or money) on the planet to run the world on renewables. Irish Greens and their acolytes are myopically focused on a single-country endeavour which will save 0.0°C of warming. Ask them why they are doing it -- they can't answer. Ask them what it will cost -- they can't answer. On their own figures the cost of Irish offshore wind is untenable, and the reality is almost certainly much worse as inflation increases the cost of risk capital.

The entire European Union is suffering from the same myopia. According to one mining expert who has attended European Commission meetings they are a bunch of delusionals with no concept of how the materials for renewables are sourced. Copper mines nowadays have to pulverise millions of tonnes of rocks down to 10 micron powders. The crushers are powered by gas-fired plants generating hundreds of megawatts. The ore is carried by diesel megatrucks that have to operate 24/7 and can't possibly run on electricity.

Mining has already expanded to use 10% of the world's energy. Powering the world on renewables would need five times the world's entire reserves of copper. Offshore wind turbines need 10 to 15 times the copper per megawatt of a fossil fuel or nuclear plant. The recyclability of both wind turbines and solar panels makes a joke of a "circular economy". When you rule out the options that can't work -- or make the problems even worse -- it's time to revisit your basic premises.

More info on "Mining our way to net zero" at Decouple podcast...

You can print all the money you like but your are going to devalue your currency against other currencies. The ECB is not going to do that. The Germans alone would go ballistic due to past experiences, and as the vast majority of green tech is produced outside of the E.U. prices for that tech would rocket.

The days of cheap money are gone and at the end of the day the piper has to be paid.

Did you miss the banking crisis and who actually paid the price for that ?

The amount of borrowed capital poured into a limited period investment for a product determines the price of that product. If we ended up with a spend of up to €200Bn on electricity based on a period of 27 years then electricity prices will rise.

When you get a bill that you are unable to pay and a threat of your electricity being cut off if you do not, try going into one of those institutions and tell them to just print off some more paper and send it on your behalf, or even print some of your own, and see how you get on.

Free money does not exist. It never will. The end user will pay at the end of the day, or similar to the banking guarantee when it comes to state contracts, everybody pays.

I was using "money" in the sense of value, wealth, and prosperity. That is not something you can create by virtual means. Otherwise I have a handwritten trillion Altairian dollar note that I'd like to exchange for your euros. The only way of creating actual wealth is by exploiting natural resources with the addition of human labour. You have everything from tulip mania to property bubbles to cryptocurrencies to show you what happens when goods are misvalued or capital misallocated.

The devil, as they say, is always in the detail.

Their renewable growth looks commendable.

Except, renewables in Finland include biomass - a hell of a lot of it, as it happens. And boy do they have a huge forestry industry to feed it.

Fossil free it may be, CO2 free it is absolutely not!

Their energy consumption per capita is roughly 3 times ours, or at least it was very recently, I cant imagine its changed much in a year or 2.