"Green" policies are destroying this country

LOL. I know you greenies have wet dreams about "Big Oil" getting sued but this nonsense has been debunked many times before, including on this thread. Exxon scientists were contributors to the IPCC and much of their output was printed in academic journals. Apart from that, the actual environmental impact wasn't caused by oil extraction but by the people who bought it and burned it. You would have to make the case that oil consumers wouldn't have bought the oil if they knew about these allegedly (but not actually) hidden documents. Seeing as how they are still buying oil in ever increasing amounts -- in fact, 65% more now than in the 1980s -- that's going to be a hard sell.

These cases will make millions for lawyers, but not much else. Even in the unlikely event of oil majors having to make payouts it would just add to their costs and reduce investment in future oil exploration. The result will be higher costs of oil and continuing profits for the majors. For consumers it will mean yet more energy price inflation as they will effectively pay all of these costs out of their own pockets. If there's a silver lining it's that people might finally join the dots and realise that the green cult is at the root of their falling standard of living.

You might have missed this one dacor?

Ah yes, another wet dream of yours. Let's take a look at those gas prices which are twice the historical norm. Latest Dutch ttf price which you cited yourself is €38/MWh. If used for baseload power in a CCGT at 60% efficiency that is €64/MWeh. The cost of renewable deployment is NOT dropping year-on-year (unless the providers are totally gouging us for higher prices in spite of lower costs): the price of renewable electricity went up 30% in the last two years and at the most recent RESS auction stood at an average of €97/MWh.

That gives a price differential of €33/MWh between the auction price of renewable electricity and the fuel costs for CCGT. An 500 MWe CCGT plant running at 80% load factor would therefore spend €120 million less on fuel than what renewables operators are charging. Over a 25 year lifetime that is €3 billion less. Would that amount cover the capital costs of building the CCGT plus the operators profit margin? Would it heck! Here is a report to the utility regulator and CRU in 2018 on the Cost of New Entrant Peaking Plant and Combined Cycle Plant in I-SEM. It covers not only plant cost but everything from land acquisition, to finance costs, to costs of grid, gas, and water connections, and everything else. The finance costs are obviously understated compared to today's interest rates (but that's the reason why renewables prices are soaring too as they are even more capital intensive).

Just like renewables, baseload CCGT is enormously profitable because of the so-called "inframarginal rent" -- the difference between their low running costs and the typical clearing prices in the day-to-day market. They also qualify for capacity payments, unlike renewables which as we know ... well, they can't guarantee any capacity.

The reason why open-cycle gas peaker plants are in trouble is because they have all the capital costs, much worse fuel efficiency ... and the moronic Greens expect them to generate for less than 500 hours per year. That's why nobody bid in the failed capacity auctions a while back, forcing the government to shell out for emergency generation ( -- yet more costs, thanks again Greens).

So yeah, all that crowing about decoupling energy prices from gas? Assuming you would then make renewables compete on a genuinely level playing field, i.e. not get preferential order of dispatch? Gas-fired baseload would wipe the floor with renewables on cost, even at what you admitted were historically elevated fuel prices. You can place the blame for our crazy high electricity prices squarely at the door of all those costs for renewables which don't add a single electron of firm capacity to meet our demand.

For what, powering our economies for the last 150 years?

If any such thing were to be tried, complicity would be spread around, including to nation states, which is why you will never see any such thing being tried.

And I suspect you already understand this equation.

So the Norway and Iceland generation- is that state owned or private sector answers to shareholders?

Ah but I think you may know the answer to this already…….

We will never have cheap electricity “because of renewables” as we have essentially privatised the electricity generation sector.

Profits are what’s driving these generation company’s not cheap electricity prices for consumers.

https://www.farmersjournal.ie/bord-na-mona-imports-brazilian-wood-chips-to-burn-in-offaly-762115

The whole thing is rotten to the core, stop locally sourced fuel being used but import from overseas. Stop locally produced beef being produced but import from overseas. Someone is making a lot of money off this nonsense at the expense of others.

In fairness profit drives every company, not just renewable energy producers. The problem is that the government is willing to shell out a seemingly unlimited premium for renewable energy on our behalf. That's not privatisation in the conventional sense, it's clientelism and has unsurprisingly brought the vultures flocking.

In the past few days I've seen sensationalist reporting about a sea surface temperature anomaly that scientists can't explain. As long as it's a positive anomaly it appears to be worthy of breathless media attention. But not a peep out of them on a possibly much more significant success in the climate science community in reconciling and explaining long-standing anomalies in satellite tropospheric temperature measurements.

Here is Ross McKitrick:

And an article by him:

And (since I believe in reading the actual academic literature and not just the headlines) here is the paper by Cheng-Zhi Zou et al. at the NOAA: "Mid-Tropospheric Layer Temperature Record Derived From Satellite Microwave Sounder Observations With Backward Merging Approach".

My own opinion: climate change is significant and concerning and still not enough to kill the economy over.

When was ESB broke up?

...cant find data at the moment, but many respected sources believe, widescale privatization of our energy markets generally has not been good for customers, as it has lead to monopolisation of markets, whereby only a few companies now control these markets, which is now leading to widescale profiting and other financialised activities such as share buy backs etc etc

edit: i have more data, but somewhere!