"Green" policies are destroying this country

When you can show us a commercial fast breeder reactor you can crow, that's not disingenuous. The proof is always can it be brought to market - as yet the answer is a resounding no and since it hits massive security issues I doubt it ever will.

Breeder reactors have been the saviour of nuclear ever since they were conceived - but haven't saved a damn thing because no one will **** well build one.

It's a **** joke.

I'm directly involved in this space and have met most of the Phase 1 suppliers and project developers recently. They are all equally pessimistic. The earliest timelines for delivery have slipped closer to 2030 and are likely to slip further. That's even with the department underwriting every MW they produce, whether accepted onto the grid or spilled for constraint, curtailment or oversupply. They have a one way bet and even still are reluctant.

So good luck with being right!

Those windfarms were delivered by private entities and semistates (who apparently all have a remit to generate electricity) like Coillte, Bord na Mona, Bord Gais, Esb, mostly on a contested basis, ie they built their connections themselves for their commercial purposes. There was little thought for the end consumer or the environment, just revenue and profits. Why did it matter how much or how little the state had? If the projects were viable, they'd have been delivered.

Plus, Eirgrid have sod all to do with construction, that's all ESB who are the Distribution and Transmission Asset Owner and have their own work culture. On top of that, all the commissioners were Esb until recently when they allowed some 3rd parties in but my understanding is that no project lay idle waiting for energisation, there were plenty of delays on the developer side too.

Those auctions had nothing to do with the delivery of renewables up to 2020. They are a recent invention by the Dept, which Eirgrid were instructed to implement.

Northern Ireland is a very poor example. If you knew anything about the transmission system up there, you would realise there's a very strong 275kV ring around Lough Neagh and Belfast but very little grid support in the west, with just a single 275kV spur to Derry. The wind located in the west is the worst possible part of the network in NI and experiences considerable network constraints, especially since a lot of it was poorly planned and connected at Distribution level to expedite connection but then had no available transmission capacity.

Next door in Donegal, we have similar levels of wind and connected in clusters at Mulreavy / Clogher, Meentycat etc. Given the weak nature of the grid in both regions, I'm not sure how you think NI is an exemplar?

What REFIT auctions were allegedly responsible for being a defacto brake? What REFIT auctions specified locations for grid connections?

The answer to both questions is none. Which coincidentally is the level of relevance in your statement to my post or what Shoog was trying to allude to.

None. That's the point. Shoog suggested there was some sort of special auction raffling off grid connections in terrible locations for the period up to 2020, when there wasn't. Then you chimed in with some references to REFIT that had no relevance whatsoever to these fictional locational auctions.

If either of you had mentioned the likes of Gate 3 (not an auction) which tried to bring some semblance of coordination to clustering projects and minimising stranded assets or inefficient grid development, you mightve had some credibility. Instead you decided to dilute the discussion with tangents and irrelevance.

The gates were a restriction on who could get a grid connection and they did restrict the amount of renewables which were allowed onto the grid. They also were only offered where the ESB had capacity, which as i said placed many projects in suboptimal locations.

Any claims that the gate system was demand driven by the renewables industry is rubbish, it delayed projects in queues, and placed no pressure on the network to put capacity where it's was most efficient. It slowed down the roll out of wind and left ESB firmly in control of strategic planning with very little will to achieve the national goals.

ESB/Eirgrid have been foot dragging since day one and the fact that buy back tariffs only arrived last year, a decade after the UK and most of the rest of Europe is testimony to their underlying attitude.