"Green" policies are destroying this country

No one is asking you to live in the Middle Ages FFS. Maybe you/ we are being asked to live in the 1970s when one car at most per household was the norm and where holidays were taken once a year in Bundoran or Courtown instead of multiple trips to Barcelona and Canberra etc etc. Where if the house was a little chilly, you put on a winter coat - not expecting to swan about in a tee shirt all day with rooms heated to 24 degrees. Where you fixed stuff rather than throwing it out and buying anew. Where there was one or two power sockets at most in most rooms etc. Where you hung clothes out on a washing line rather than always bundling them into a dryer et etc etc

In my lifetime Irish peoples expectations of all these things above have gone through the roof. And the idea that we can continue with cheap endless energy is just ridiculous.

...our approach of squeezing people simply will not work, we must give something back to people, most households are being forced to behave in the way they do due to modern pressures, such as fulfilling property requirements, mortgage and rent etc, hammering the sh1te out of these folks wont solve our environmental problems, and this has been our approach to date, it wont work, we must include radical policies such as a ubi and possible/probably a significant reduction in the working week, in order for these measures to actually work.....

Grand but a lot of Irish people don't or can't be bothered to cut back on their energy use. They've become accustomed to it and it's just hard to give up what you think is the norm.

I am critical of the modern Greens because instead of pushing the unpopular policy of 'reduce, reuse and recycle' with an emphasis on 'reduce', they are happy to try and sell the idea that we can continue merrily as we are but just substitute Green energy technology instead for existing sources.

Of course the Greens will immediately say - oh no, we encourage less use and point to this, that and the other. But that's not the broader policy and message they sell, as it's politically unpalatable to tell people to make do with less. And they want to keep their seats.

Bottom line is that our teenagers and young adults use multiple amounts of energy and consume far more goods that when I was their age. And it's hard to deny them that as that's what they've grown up with.

Idle curiosity but where does Eamon Ryan intend getting this gas for energy storage from.

From Norway via the Moffat lines which both our own regulator and Eirgrid have both pointed out are in non compliance with E.U. directives on energy security or from some other source ?

If it`s the cost to the customer that you have a problem with from privately owned LNG terminals then why are we not building our own rather than the Irish Green Party attempting to introduce legislation to ban such a terminal. Compared to the cost of the ESB 30 Gigawatt offshore plane it would be mere pennies.

Why do you believe that nuclear would not be workable for Ireland ?

We have the same population more or less as Finland who generate 40% of their electricity requirements from nuclear and Eamon Ryan does not seem to believe it would cause any problems for our grid. In Winter 2021 he was talking about us getting nuclear generated electricity from France should we need it. Admittedly Ryan might not be a great example as he didn`t appear to realise the interconnector he was talking about hadn`t received planning permission then let alone be operational, but the U.K. interconnector doesn`t differentiate between nuclear generated electricity and any other source.

Wind, especially offshore wind, is not really very expensive, it is eye-wateringly expensive. There have been numerous verifiable examples posted here from U.K. and U.S. studies that show for just the offshore construction alone, this wind + hydrogen plan favored by greens is multiples of the cost of nuclear to provide the same generation. And that is just for the offshore costs. All the hydrogen associated costs (which no matter how often it is asked off them greens keep running away from), when added would make that multiple many times greater than nuclear.

You know perfectly well that a large percentage of LNG on the global market is produced using fracking which is a much dirtier process than even the already hugely polluting direct extraction

relying on LNG imports directly conflicts with our climate policies.

Fracking is illegal in most of the EU

Why so you love LNG so much out of curiosity?

Irish government policy

And of course renewables had a role in the price of electricity falling

The Finnish grid has far higher demand than ours and is part of the much larger Nordic grid. We are in a much smaller synchronized grid. They have a lot more interconnection than us.

They build big stations, around 1.4GW. They build big because big nuclear plants are much better value for money than small plants

why does this matter? Because of the guidance from the International Atomic Energy Agency. They advise that a single plant be no larger than 10 percent of the lowest level of demand. This is to guard against a trip in a single plant pulling down the whole grid. Our trough demand is maybe 3.5 GWh, so the largest plant we would want on the grid is 350 MW.

There are ways around this with interconnectors but it means you have to reserve capacity on the interconnector (can’t use full import capacity whilst the nuclear plant is running) and contract capacity on the other end of the interconnector, or by running the plant at a fraction of its power, or just by building a less economic, smaller sized nuclear plant. Any of these make the whole thing unviable.

The new generation of small modular reactors may make it more wirkabke for Ireland.

Gas is traded on the market, Price is set by demand vs supply. When Putin invaded ukraine and severely restricted the gas supply, the price went up

The price went up for 2 reasons,

1. Day to day demand caused the supply price to increase while alternative supplies were sourced, and
2. EU countries started to fill up their gas reserves. Normally this is done when prices are low, but they did this during high demand and low supply which further pushed up the prices of gas

During this time, wind and Solar accounted for 25% of Europes' electricity generation

If the wind and solar wasn't available, gas prices would have been even higher than they were, and it would have taken longer to re-fill the gas reserves

Every KW generated from wind and solar, is a KW that we don't need to burn in Gas

In fact, big increases in wind and solar also cushioned the energy market from the drought conditions that reduced the ability to generate from Hydro electric plants, as well as the heatwaves that reduced the capacity at Nuclear power stations. Without the increases in Solar and Wind production, it is absolutely guaranteed that your electricity and gas heating costs would have been higher this winter.

Hydrogen is fantasy (with the exception of ammonia production) and let's hope the 2023 ends some of the chat and waste associated with this

You could have just saved yourself time and effort by admitting that renewable do not make the slightest difference to electricity prices.

They are receiving the same price per unit as gas so it makes not one iota of difference to the price no matter how much or how little gas is used in the generation mix.

As i pointed out to you on your 10% drop causing grid meltdown two gas fired plants tripped out within seconds of each other in November 2021 with a loss of 20% of the demand at that time and the grid didn`t shut down so why was that ?

Not much point in putting a consortium together when we have green idiots in government not only blocking any attempts at complying with E.U. directives on energy security, but are hypocritically happy to use nuclear power when stuck but determined to block it being generated here.

I find it very amusing that greens talk so much about the massive profits from nuclear, yet somehow appear to believe that spending 100s of Billions on an offshore plan that will require further massive investment every 27 years will provide cheaper electricity. Who do they thing will fund that other than the consumer, charitable investors or the tooth fairy ?

So you think the IAEA are a bunch of liars?

That trip was only 540 MW, nothing like 1.4 GW, and the trip did not happen near the daily trough.

As it happens your anecdote proves the point. If one of the tripping plants had been a nuclear 1.1 GW unit then the consequences would have been severe.

Have you had electrical engineering advice on this? Who is telling you that this is workable? Or do you just really want it to be true?