"Green" policies are destroying this country

I totally get where you are going with this and it's not the maddest I've ever heard. Basically, let renewables do their best to generate hydrogen on a competitive basis. Don't bother with all the expense of connecting them to the grid as their sole function will be hydrogen generation. I get it.

But it has a considerable flaw, possibly a fatal one. If you look at Irish or UK plans for hydrogen (I've posted links to both previously) both of them acknowledge the problem that you are trying to bootstrap a hydrogen economy from zero. You have to deal with the fact that grey hydrogen is vastly cheaper. Then you have to create an entire new hydrogen-based transport infrastructure plus whatever other bits of the economy you are planning to decarbonise with hydrogen. It's an absolutely massive undertaking. Everybody accepts that any new enterprise will be loss-making for a very long time. You cannot attract private capital unless you are offering upfront subsidies and the guarantee of a future market. (In fact, it's very similar to problems I've acknowledged for nuclear ... except worse).

Given that you have to decide up front that you are in hydrogen for the long haul, it really isn't just a matter of "suck it and see". You can't try it and abandon it without massive sunk costs.

Just a little reminder from COP28 that developing countries are not fooled by green platitudes. They know that the default route to first world riches is the same route that the first world countries took themselves. Mandating economically infeasible renewable solutions is NOT going to work. We either come up with something better and cheaper through technical innovation, or accept that decarbonisation ain't happening.

This sums up the whole charade perfectly.

After 27 years of shows bleating about renewables and how they were going to solve the worlds problems, the fossil fuel nations said okay - let's host this and bring your toys and plans to the show.

The lesson for the greens here is don't bring a knife to a gun fight.

I'm still for seeing can it work, I don't believe a nuclear exclusive grid provides us any more energy security than fossil fuels currently do, for example.

I don't believe, either, that an all-renewable grid is technically or economically feasible and to even come close to trying would require you to have a blank cheque which the Irish consumer most certainly does not have.

But we most certainly do need to get away from burning things to produce energy and BEV power for long-haul trucking, shipping, aviation and rail is simply not practical due to weight, bulk and the relatively long downtime required for "refuelling".

So - if renewables can truly produce energy in the quantity we'd require to meet all of our energy needs on this island and in a manner that is cost effective, let's see it happen on a relatively large scale first.

Let's not go and start re-engineering our grid, trying to transport and store TWh worth of hydrogen in bulk most likely to be burnt in a gas turbine (hello, NOx), and pumping hundreds of millions worth of concrete and copper into some of the most extreme locations on the planet.

BOC off the Long Mile currently fuel the hydrogen fuel cell Dublin Bus vehicles here - ~8 minutes to refuel for 300KM-400KM of service.

While BMW are trialling a fuel cell X5 in the UK with reports of ~500KM of range on the back of a refuelling time of 3-4 minutes.

Iarnrod Eireann are currently looking to re-engine a 1970's two-stroke diesel locomotive, albeit it'll nr combustion based rather than fuel cell, but as I understand it will still produce less pollutants overall once converted than it's current diesel engine does so still a win.

So the means to get the hydrogen into the vehicles has been shown to be possible, fuelling related downtime is identical to that of petrol and diesel, but can we produce the hydrogen and transport it at the scale needed? Again, before we pump all of the millions into rolling out massive grid upgrades to drop in high speed chargers at key arterial route hubs that will see, at most, 3 cars with a full charge per hour with no hope of it getting through even a single truck, rollout hydrogen hubs as well.

Ultimately, if it isn't going to work for transport, it absolutely will not work as the means of backing our electricity grid. Until we try, we won't know, and until we know we'll still have those insisting their pure, all-renewable grid, and everything-electrified idea is the only way forward.

Because it is cheaper than cracking methane when the input from the wind turbines is very cheap as they'll be using surplus electricity. Also, governments will regulate 'blue' and 'Grey' hydrogen out of the market as soon as green hydrogen production is mature enough to take over.

Up to now, the electricity grid is based on demand. The marginal cost of electricity is high because you have to pay for the fuel and man power to run the electricity generators, and you also have the high fixed costs of the plant and machinery that is incorporated into every unit of electricity.

Electricity is generated on demand, and when demand is low, generators are shut off and all that expensive plant and machinery and all the infrastructure is sitting there doing nothing because we have very limited energy storage

The future renewable based grid is based on Supply. The marginal cost of the electricity generated is very very low, and instead the price of the energy is based on utilising the fixed assets as much of the time as we can. This decouples demand from supply, and it means we generate surplus energy when there is a lot of renewables, and then this energy is stored and used when it is needed, and the price of this works out as the average cost of the on demand energy, and the costs of storing and re-releasing the energy when there is a supply shortage

Most of the time, there will be enough or greater supply than there is demand, so there will be periods where energy is very cheap, and at the times when there is a deficit of supply, energy will get very expensive. This creates economic opportunities to store cheap energy, and sell it when it is expensive. Domestic users with modern smart meters, will store cheap energy in domestic batteries and in vehicles (and many will generate their own energy with rooftop solar)

Commercial and industrial users will store energy because it will make commercial sense to do so, and all of this along with grid scale storage, and long term storage through strategic reserves and Ammonia storage, will result in a stable, healthy energy economy that doesn't rely on any fossil fuels and emits close to zero carbon pollution from the generation and transportation of energy.

Nuclear 'can' do load following, but it is pretty bad at it, and it makes the plants less efficient, more expensive to maintain and have a much shorter operating lifespan

If we build enough Nuclear to cover more than baseload, with BESS storing the surplus to use when there is peak demand, it will increase the costs of nuclear significantly. I would suggest that the 'backup generators' would end up being much cheaper to run than keeping the nuclear power plants running at reduced capacity or curtailed, and we'd end up mothballing a bunch of extremely expensive nuclear assets, which would then drive up the LCOE from nuclear to a level that would have meant that we would always have been better off just building renewables from the start and never bothering with the nuclear 'experiment' in the first place

DunkelFlaute that happens over an extended period and over an extended geographical area is a relatively rare event. On average, a 2 day 'dunkelflaute' happens once every 5 years in Europe but they typically happen in shorter bursts of a few hours, or one to 2 days at a time

This is actually perfectly fine if we have the infrastructure to handle it. Which we currently do by using Gas turbines to cover the gap, but we don't want to be burning gas long term, so the plan is to convert those turbines to burn Ammonia instead, and to have a strategic reserve of this fuel available to draw on when we need it.

It is also a mistake to assume that Nuclear does not have to be backed up. France had half of it's nuclear generation capacity go offline at the same time within the past 12 months, and instead of that being a few hours or days of an outage, they were out for weeks and months at a time.

Nuclear still requires backups