"Green" policies are destroying this country

I'll still keep on voting Green op

That’s exactly it. I said it on another thread in the past few days, the abrupt ending of peat production will easily go down as one of the stupidest decisions ever made by an Irish government.

Unfortunately political parties went with this to appease a few poorly educated people, that think this will save the world, in order to hold onto their votes.

The problem is none of the clowns that are crying out about saving the planet bothered to research where the power for every electrical device they use comes from.

Everyone knows peat production has to end but it should have been phased out over 10 years to allow for an adequate replacement to be developed. Be that wind, water, nuclear, inter-connector to France, whatever it may be.

Instead it was done all of a bang and now the hauliers can’t keep the imported peat drew down the road from the ships sending it in. There’s gas generators that are only supposed to used minimally in times of stress on the grid, that are now running full time. Money Point, the biggest coal burning power plant in the country, is back running 7 days a week burning imported coal after all the workers were given redundancy a year ago as it was supposed to be closing down.

I seriously worry for anyone who hasn’t the intelligence required to realise that the closing down of our own peat burning power plants is doing far more harm than good to both our economy and the environment.

Green policies are ruining the country? I would agree but only because they have consistently failed to address any of the major issues we have.

• Ireland are failing to meet their legally obliged EU carbon commitments and as a result we will be fined.  We have the third highest per capita emissions in the EU.
• Ireland was also above World Health Organization air quality guidelines at 33 monitoring sites across the country and we have exceeded our national emissions limit for nitrogen oxides since 2010.
• 85% of our EU protected habitats have an inadequate or a bad status and 20% of Ireland’s breeding bird species are in long-term decline.
• 47% of our rivers and 50% of our lakes are in bad or poor condition. Over half (56%) of our wastewater load was not compliant with EU treatment standards in 2019. 
• We are producing more rubbish each year. Recycling rates have stagnated since 2010 and more recently shown a decline.

Our environmental record is nothing short of a disgrace and actually getting worse. And I'm not talking about carbon or greenhouse gases - the air we breath and water we drink is more polluted than ever.

They tend to be big ... So you need a lot of spinning reserve to cover them - ( ie . You always need stations spinning and ready to cover a breakdown on the system -obviously it has to be big enough to cover the biggest single point of failure on the system )

It's eyewateringly expensive -have a look at how much the 2 new stations being built in the uk are going to cost - and that price is index linked - and they get paid the top whack 24/7/365 that they're producing - wether the power is needed or not ....

Decommissioning of nuclear power plants is slow and expensive ... And not really done yet ... They still haven't got long term storage for high level waste in the uk ,

It's very low carbon when you don't include the construction and decommissioning of the stations, the storage of the waste , and the mining and processing of the fuel , ( although in fairness all fuel sources have a carbon cost )

And that's before you get to the " I don't want it anywhere me factor "

I'm actually not against nuclear power (it just doesn't make sense financially ) , and I don't want it anywhere near me ...

Well when you lay it out like that I does show a perception of lack of forward planning and thinking what if which does seem to be a perception of many which in probably unfair but as they say perception becomes reality.

Finland ,Estonia and soon to be Poland have a huge stragetic reason for going nuclear -and that reason is a huge supplier of natural gas to Europe ,

The plants should have a very long life , and they need it to be worth while , they can also have a ridiculously long construction and commissioning time - just look at the "new" reactor being built in Finland , just a little late and a little over budget ... https://www.reuters.com/article/finland-nuclear-idUSL8N24I4LH

Incidentally,that article is from 2019 - and the plant is now estimating it'll be ready in 2022... Maybe. ..

The reason that the electricity from hinkley is going to be so expensive is because edf (and it's partners) are bearing all the risk, they're only going to get paid for the electricity produced , and because the risk of it not coming up rosey is pretty high, and the sums being borrowed are huge and for an enormous period of time then it's expensive ...

On a selfish note, I'm bored with working in finance, I have a degree in theoretical physics, I'd love to retrain and return to Ireland and work on the first Irish nuclear power plant even for massively reduced salary in a junior role. It would be exciting.

water charges were primarily due to the timing and approach to doing so, revolt was ultimately due to austerity polices, which are currently catastrophically failing, so much so, that many troika members have since agreed so. the most obvious failures have been towards creating and providing critically needed public services and infrastructure, again, all linked to austerity measures. rubbish, an interesting one, again, our modern political ideologies ultimately focuses on the individual, and largely ignores the whole system and processes involved, which has lead to major failures in approaches such as the 'polluter pays', which largely ignores the creators of our goods and services

no data centers are really not red herrings, they cost a fortune to run, provide virtually fcuk all good quality jobs, and to add insult, society as a whole gains virtually fcuk all in regards the overall wealth thats created from their collection of this data, so no, far from red herrings!

theres no question we need them, our modern economy couldnt function without them but, we really need to get serious about them, theres clearly serious problems in regards energy consumption and wealth distribution from their activities, these urgently need to be addressed, or.....

...but if we continue on a similar path, you can be damn sure it wont work, pointing fingers at other nations, is beyond stupid

Your response would have been a lot better if it was actually correct. There's nothing wrong with Aghada. It's WG1 at Glanagow that's out of service according to REMIT.

Fair enough , I should have said whitegate ... Slip of the tongue 😜, (currently looking at aghada , whitegate is behind me )

And I didn't even know Glanagow was the name of the townland ,

Incidentally if it's Wg1 ,is there a Wg2 ? Or is it just a code to allow for expansion ?