"Green" policies are destroying this country

May I suggest you read your own propaganda and look into the background of your own sources. You recently quoted skeptical science (SS for short)

The picture below of John Cook of 97% fame was found on their own web-site and was produced by their OWN team using photoshop. It's a play on the SS (hilarious haha) . . . here is the thing, rather than delete the embarrassing files when caught, they moved them to a folder called a11g0n3

That's exactly how I was saying it works.

The issue is that the next expensive gas plants are quite expensive at that point in the mix. The aghada, and poolbegs of this world are relatively cheap combined cycle gas plants. But the peakers are open cycle, less efficient, and more expensive, by avoiding them setting the SMP, we are reducing the price per kWh across the mix.

It doesn`t matter how efficient the a plant is.

The last plant to fill the demand sets the wholesale price. The percentage of the source being used in the overall generation mix from that plant does not make one iota of difference regardless of how low that percentage is. It still determines the wholesale price.

The bizarre situation under the marginal pricing policy is that if you want cheap electricity then your only way of achieving that would be to use no other fossil fuel other than the cheapest.

I think your missing my point, I am talking about that exact last, most expensive, plant thru the gate. If it is less efficient, it will bid a higher price which will then become the SMP. Thus bringing up the electricity price across the board.

And having more plant with a lower bid in price will reduce our exposure to those expensive plants. The inefficient plants will burn more fuel per kWh than the more efficient ones lower down the order.

Are you not perhaps missing the point that with the most expensive component being the one that sets the wholesale price, even if that component only makes up 1% of the overall total, higher efficiency cost savings would be negligible as the operating costs plus the providers profit margin for the day would be the same as if that plant was using 5 times as much to generate.

Is it not time that greens held their hands up and admitted that renewables have not saved the consumer a cent in charges under the marginal pricing policy. If the E.U. or greens were interested in lowering electricity costs then they should be calling for the scrapping of that policy. Or at the very least, decoupling gas rather than persisting with this farce of pretending that these puff pieces from renewable companies, who are the main financial beneficiaries, are nothing other than propaganda aimed at keeping the good times rolling for them while the consumer and the economy suffers. ?

OK think I get what you are saying now. The whole issue with the SMP concept is that a generator with a small impact on Kwh provided has a large impact on price. So that 1% generator is very impactful, and their inefficiencies also extend to lack of economies of scale due to being smaller and generally spreading fixed costs across a smaller annual energy production.

Re your second point, there is more literature supporting the concept that renewables save money in SMP environment (not just the recent piece from WEI). For example, there was a study done by Queens in Belfast in 2017 that had similar findings.

It's also a situation that IS changing, the latest RESS auctions have the potential to have negative payments when wholesale price is high. (Which can be seen in the PsO decision for this year). So the wrinkle that is being caused by SMP is going to be eroded as those projects start to get to the end of their 15 year REFiT contract as we progress thru the next 5 to 10 years. (The last refit 2 projects contract will finish in about 2032. But the majority will be in the late 20's).

Well no. Assuming you mean wind farm operator (and not grid operator), that would be bad business to turn off.

The negative payment is only associated with the surplus due to high electricity price. I.e. If the market pays a RESS windfarm 100 /Mwh, but their RESS cfd is 70/MWh, then the negative payment is just repaying the 30/Mwh delta. So if they turned off the wind farm, they'd be missing out on the 70/MWh. Which doesn't make sense.

And your second paragraph is a sweeping generalisation of what I said, that also happens to be incorrect. The change around negative payments doesn't preclude the previously discussed savings around reduction in SMP being realised previously, now or tomorrow. The negative payments simply open the door for renewable generation to actually get paid less than the going rate.

...but we're talking about the Irish electricity market, with its particular market set up...they're UK wind farms.

What I am saying is very simple.

The only people getting any benefit from the marginal pricing policy are those who own and operate renewable energy sources. If, as is claimed, they can be generated much cheaper than any other source then the profit margins are much greater. That is not a "wrinkle" that even according to you is going to be changed any time soon by this pricing policy

Rather than talk about peaker plant efficiencies that would have little or no difference, as I have asked a number of times, why will the E.U., at a minimum, not decouple gas from the marginal pricing policy, and why will the greens not call for this rather than parroting puff pieces by wind generating companies in particular, that have not made a red cents difference in reducing the price of electricity and never will under this policy ?

As we saw recently in the U.K. the chances of negative payments is slim. If the figure between their strike price and the wholesale price is less than their generation costs and their strike price there would still be a margin in it for them to supply. If the figure is greater then they will simply not supply. Fair enough you may say that we cannot expect them to supply at a loss, but the strike price is the price they agreed to supply at, so really they are getting jam on both sides. First shot at getting their produce accepted and thus maximising their profits, as well as no onus on them to supply when their is no profit in it for them. That is not a contract, it`s an open ended licence to make money at a cost to both the consumer and the economy.

Ask Aussies how solar and wind worked out for them. The more of those you have the bigger instability of the grid.

China expects to add 70 gigawatts (GW) of coal-fired power generation this year, up from 40 GW of capacity from coal installed in 2022, a report from the power sector’s group, China Electricity Council, showed.

But but we need to lead by example and hopefully Chinese will notice.😱