"Green" policies are destroying this country

It's rate of commissioning of new plants has slowed dramatically, and it plans for further expansion has also slowed. This is been driven by the significantly faster roll out of all forms of renewables which are considerably cheaper for them to put on their grid.

How's those locational auctions that never happened working out? Perhaps Eirgrid's records of them are flooded by not dredging the Dodder? Or maybe they were stopped because of all the "overrunning"?

By the end of 2022, the cost of the 575 KM extension lead to France has soared to $1.6 billion. The Marinus link laying down two 750-megawatt undersea cables between Australia and Tasmania (375 KM) recently had it's costs blow out to $3.3 to $5.5 billion. There is also the basslink cable in that part of the world whose operators went bankrupt and who experienced 2 major outages, that took months to fix. Fixing faults on undersea cables takes time, see UK/France inter-connector, not to mention the East West Interconnector (EWIC) fault a few years ago.

Then we have to talk about the farcical Saudi Arabia of Wind business model for running all these inter-connectors between Ireland the UK and France. The people who live and work in Saudi get cheap petrol and diesel, will Irish consumers be getting cheap electricity from unreliable generators. Not a chance.

The Gate system was not an auction so you can stop pretending you are some sort of knowledgeable historian on the topic. You didn't even know there was a Gates system till I explained it to you after you kept incorrectly referring to auctions.

The Dept and Regulator were the architect to that approach and instructed Eirgrid and Esb to process applications in a particular order to manage a queue of 28GW with no coordination between projects. I don't know how many times it has to be explained to you but the goal was to connect sufficient renewables to meet 2020 targets in a cost effective manner i.e. share transmission connection assets where feasible, to keep overall costs down. That goal was met in 2020 so I don't know where you get your conspiracies about Eirgrid and Esb from. They were hardly expected to accommodate all 28GW (a lot of which was speculation by anyone who paid a modest application fee) in an unplanned manner with a criss-cross spiderweb of connections, all at the electricity bill payers expense?

All 4GW of Gate 3 offers were issued by 2013, leaving developers with a whopping 7 years to deliver their allegedly "shovel ready" projects. Given some only connected in 2021, I get the impression that it wasn't the system operators who forgot to take off the handbrake.

I have already shown you that China has presently 21 new nuclear power plants under construction, has just add a further 6 new reactors, and is planning to construct 6 - 8 new nuclear plants each year for the foreseeable future, yet somehow that is China rolling back on its nuclear plans 😕

Where you got the same idea as regards France I have no idea, but perhaps you missed Macron`s plan placing nuclear power at the heart of their drive for carbon neutrality by 2050 and the approval by a large majority (402/130) in March this year of those plans by the French Parliament.

As too these considerably cheaper renewables added to the grid, I`m still waiting for your cost for the green favoured 38GW offshore wind plan for 60 years, when based on the Finnish cost, even with all the delays and over-runs, the comparative cost for here of nuclear would be roughly €35 Billion.

One of the things that amuses me about the Green ideologues is that they are quick to rubbish nuclear on the basis of cost overruns, delays, and maintenance issues ... but never seem curious about why those problems occur or whether they can be fixed. Meanwhile they blame delays in rollout of renewables on grid operators, planners etc. etc. All the while claiming that price reductions in renewable technology will lower overall costs.

Nuclear is an industry just starting to recover from decades in the doldrums. A lot of the impetus for building Gen 2 reactors happened in the 70s due to the twin oil crises. By the 80s, anti-nuke activism was well under way. Nuclear came under unusually intense regulatory scrutiny and public opposition which added to costs. The golden era of Gen 2 plant construction was already over by the end of the 70s in the US and the 80s in France. But nuclear was already contributing a sizable fraction of national needs in both countries in that short space of time, and France had the highest share of nuclear energy generation in the world.

Forty years has elapsed since the heyday. The upshot is that new nuclear now faces a dearth of construction experience, continuing regulatory bureaucracy, the need for new Gen 3 and 4 reactor designs, and an existing fleet that has been running for up to half a century. Two new Gen 3 reactors -- the Westinghouse AP-1000 and the Areva EPR -- were still being designed during their first project build outs. They have led to something of a fiasco at Vogtle in Georgia USA and Flamanville in Normandy (both of them being number 3 reactors on existing nuclear sites). Reports on both sites have blamed construction contractor delays and poor project management. There is nothing wrong with the reactor technology itself, although EPR is too complicated and will be simplified in a redesign.

Given the age of France's existing fleet and the specific piping issues found at 12 reactors last year, the overall fleet still has a remarkably high uptime and capacity factor. New reactor designs have had teething trouble, but that can be overcome. They aren't much different in that regard from renewable technologies. That's assuming you take the overall process required to get renewables online into account, and not just a crane erecting a single wind turbine in a matter of days.

Sorry, I have put Dacor on ignore but am I picking up this correctly when he/she says carbon tax takings are being used on other monetary needs for inefficiently run departments? If that’s the case, I only hope the greens come knocking on my door come the next election. Said it all along they are the greatest BS’ers in politics, this revelation only cements that thought.

Yes, that seems to be the case. The greens get to feel all warm and fuzzy for helping those less fortunate with their stealth taxes despite giving on the one hand but taking it away on the other lest the recipient try to heat their home, power appliances or travel somewhere. The solution - use less. Meanwhile, aforementioned Green jets off on their 3rd international trip of the year after driving to the airport in their ultra heavy EV...

Be a shame to miss out on vital information

We have a 5.5GW system in Ireland. Even if that doubled to 11GW demand, we'd have no need for 37GW of offshore wind. What would we do with it all? Where would it go? Europe won't want to pay for it considering they can source their own in the shallow North sea and not have to worry about transmission losses or €2Bn per 1GW interconnector from Ireland.

Anyone who suggests any numbers higher than 5GW should be disregarded as it'll take a fleet of boats we don't have, just to service that amount.

What's going on here?

I wasn't making an argument. The study that just came out specifically said 'at least 125k years, in that was the distance back in time that they could be confident of the data

It's not a conspiracy

Also, it's not cherry picking to say 'from now, to 125k years in the past, it has never been warmer globally than it is today

What is cherry-picking is to say something like 'it was warmer in one specific place, for one period of time x number of years ago, therefore climate change is natural'

That would be distorting the argument, to try to disprove a global average with reference to a local or regional climate, because we know and all scientists acknowledge, that there is greater variability locally, than there is globally