"Green" policies are destroying this country

Which for some reason the E.U. are very lax to change.

Who do you believe that suits ?

Your "Big Wind" companies selling electricity perhaps!

Isn't that what you'd expect though from a body such as the SEAI? Are these two points incompatible?

• The increase in 2021 emissions was driven by electricity generation, up 17.3 per cent; transport, up 7.3 per cent; and industry up 3.3 per cent.

and

• More electric vehicles, upgrades of 500,000 homes to at least B2 energy rating and more heat pumps in place of oil and gas boilers.

I'd hate at the moment to be reliant on electricity, no matter how it's generated, for most of our transport, cooking and heating needs.

Unreliable electricity generation in Europe will fall with the decline of Germany. Angela Merkel made a political decision to build wind turbines and shutdown nuclear to placate the Greens and import Russian gas to cover up its deficiencies. Russian president Putin was delighted. It gave him economic and political control over Germany and Russian funds to the environmental groups made Greens popular as well. Germany’s economy has already begun to implode, given the production suspensions and terminations by BASF and Thyssen-Krupp. As it collapses, it takes the EU down with it.

• Germany's half-a-trillion dollar energy bazooka may not be enough

Further damaging interventions are the emissions trading schemes that must be paid by European consumers and are a massive wealth transfer from people with lower incomes to those in receipt of the subsidies. Adding more wind turbines is not bringing down the cost of electricity to end consumers.

Due to a lack of cheap and available energy, EU protectionism using a carbon border tax is going to aggravate the economic misery for many of us across the zone (if it gets anywhere). The multinationals will rearrange their affairs (regulatory arbitrage) and all this will do is shift production to other countries where emissions are higher and energy is available.

• More fights ahead for EU carbon border tax

That description has been around for quite some time. It does the Green movement no favours that it does not really have any champions on the political right.

If we are going to go there, the sun has been around longer than the propeller.

I don't know why you would think that. A wind turbine is just an electrical generator with a gearbox and some complicated control electronics.

The Betz limit for maximum theoretical wind turbine efficiency was formulated over a hundred years ago. More recent work has shown the Betz limit to be too high, and current wind turbines approach the modern theoretical limit. So there's nothing in the way of efficiency to be squeezed out of new turbines.

The only way to improve them is to catch more wind. That means building a) bigger, b) higher and c) offshore. The latest machines are monsters. For instance the GE Haliade-X has a rotor area of 38,000 square metres and a height of 260m (850 ft). An up close view of the nacelle gives you an idea of scale:

The main problem with these things is the separate (and relatively measly) 12-14 MW generator for every unit. That uses an awful lot of copper, not to mention a tonne of neodymium and other rare earths. Though for these offshore turbines the biggest copper use is actually in the cabling.

Wind is very much a proven tech. It's been used for centuries to power any number of energy sources, long before fossil fuels or even electricity itself.

When it comes to electricity generation for a modern grid, it has proven itself to be completely incapable of being able to follow demand profiles.

When we need power most, i.e. periods of deep cold, or extreme heat, this tends to coincide with extremely calm conditions and so direct electricity generation from wind effectively fails outright. The Eirgrid dashboard has proven this.

OK, so you say we bridge the gap by massively overbuilding wind generation to capture significantly more wind energy than we need and storing that "somehow" to subsequently power your generator, e.g. hydrogen.

That aspect is, as of yet, completely unproven at the scale and runtime needed to maintain grid output.

Since this intermediary storage is fundamental to maintain a functioning modern electrical grid using only (true!) renewable sourced energy, such a grid is therefore completely unproven.

What a monstrosity - imagine that near you and the shocking amount of mined materials going into making it and the necessary cabling. Never mind the construction impact on environment. First wind farm came to our region over 20 years ago, we went up and marvelled at the soaring towers. This particular installation is tiny now though compared to the 150m+ height machines they've installed on other nearby hills.

@[Deleted User]

• "Deployment of district heating networks at scale to replace gas and oil use for heating"

There will be a lot of push back against that there are constant threads on Reddit and here about how apartment owners are getting massive increases in bills from district heating companies. They blame high gas prices but still there is no completion and its not regulated.

Don't forget the nuclear decommissioning costs, Fukushima is at $100Bn and counting...

I think that because its a fact, wind energy is cheaper to build and run now than it has been in the past, and it keeps getting cheaper.

How can you state that as a fact when you consistently attempt to ignore how much just the offshore section of a plan you back will cost ?

Turbines are not getting cheaper, they are going to get much more expensive. The end of year reports from Siemens, Vestra and General Electric all posted here recently a number of time all show that. Vestra is selling turbines at 8% below cost, Siemens Gamesa lost close to €1 Bn and has effectively gone broke, and General Electric has lost $2 Bn.

have we anyway of actually knowing if anyone has had excess wind energy to export? id imagine most energy networks are interlinked, as is the case in ireland, i.e. all our energy production systems are connected, so its not possible to know exactly what energy source is being exported, at any one time

ffs, one of them could run the country, some yokes