"Green" policies are destroying this country

Wow, you could have me agreeing with you more often. Apologies, but maybe I am the stopped clock.

Id say nuclear power is not high on the agenda due to its huge cost and risk levels. 32 countries have nuclear power but some are looking to back out of using it, mainly due to 3 accidents since 1979.

"Following Fukushima, Germany has permanently shut down eight of its 17 reactors and pledged to close the rest by the end of 2022.[2] Italy voted overwhelmingly to keep their country non-nuclear.[3] Switzerland and Spain have banned the construction of new reactors.[4] Japan’s prime minister has called for a dramatic reduction in Japan’s reliance on nuclear power."

Wind energy is a relatively new technology. Id say the hope it that over the next few decades more improvement in efficiency will come, its still early days. Wind energy developments may render nuclear less viable also.

Taxing people more makes them poorer, resulting in less consumption that is killing the planet.

It is not new technology wind energy in particular wind turbines have been used for a long time. I find it useful to dry my clothes hung on the washing line. Wind energy is low quality when it comes to providing electrical energy. Check out the Betz limit - no turbine can capture more than 16/27 (59.3%) of the kinetic energy in wind. They need about 50 acres per megawatt generated, consider most of the best and cheapest sites for wind turbines have already been consumed, there are also the raw material requirements that go with that dispersal (Foundations, cabling from remote areas to the distribution network, towers, nacelles and blades), with a design lifetime of perhaps 20 years. That's a lot of capital, mining and land area tied up in those, the trend is also for taller towers and blades, in 20 years time the existing concrete and steel foundations are no good to carry the larger, heavier loads and stronger wind force load. Wind turbine effectiveness (the load factor, to use the engineering term) is determined by the wind that is available, and that randomly varies from second to second, day to day, season to season, year to year. The strategy of wind turbines is an economic white elephant project on a larger scale than the turf powered stations were.

The costs running offshore wind turbines are higher (installation, maintenance, depreciation) and you are ignoring the economics of managing random surplus power on the grid when it is not needed (curtailment payments) and having to maintain the capital equipment on standby for when the wind does not blow or sun shine. The other site of that is what happens when the gas plants lose money and shutdown, there was major panic in Eirgrid back in 2018 when Viridian planed to close its Dublin power plants.

If you watch carefully reserve power generation capacity across all systems in Europe are being removed leaving us dependent on random power generation and other countries surplus power via inter-connectors, if that worst case scenario, freezing weather over North Western Europe with little wind, there will be no surplus power power at any price available at a time when consumer demand surges. The plan is to use secondary source energy (i.e. electricity) to run heat pumps and electric cars (BEVs), primary source fuel (gas, coal, wood) is not an option today for heating in many apartments and increasingly new housing builds. It will be increasingly hard to get parts for gas and oil fired boilers after 2025 leaving consumers with higher maintenance costs when equipment breaks.

But hydogen and batteries the critics say. Battery storage is only good for short intermittent dips in power, it cannot sustain 24 hours of limited to no random energy. Hydrogen gas is not an option before 2030 and comes with its own higher cost of manufacture and distribution network challenges.

It is rising but there are still concerns about using nuclear energy. Perhaps its use would be considered a last option in Ireland anyway. Accidents are rare but potential devastating. Because no one has yet found a way to long term store energy from wind farms doesn't mean they wont improve storage technology in the next decade or 2. I dont think id be happy to start down the nuclear route just yet. Id rather see how wind, wave, solar technologies develop over the next decade or 2 first & also see if people can reduce their energy demands as time goes on (doubtful).

I think reducing our energy consumption 1st should be the main goal and in parallel look at how are energy is supplied. It wont be easy with a rising population. People insulating there homes is a start. The next 20 years will be interesting.

Perhaps ESB networks will put you on the same test program they have me on, where they disconnect your power for 8 days in a year. That reduces energy consumption quite substantially.

While climate change is given as the major reason for the rush for wind turbines, the origins of the current policy in Western Europe go back to the oil crisis of the 1970s and the fact that Western Europe has little in the way of oil and gas, post world war II they built the electricity network on coal and oil. Several countries especially France pursued a nuclear generated electricity policy. There is also the peak oil hypothesis that had a lot of traction in the late 90s into the 2000's among planners and the many of the electricity generation plants built in the aftermath of the war were reaching the end of their working life. There are several economic problems with wind turbines, they are low density, dispersed and random output and in a free market the output can never command a premium price, hence taxpayers and electricity consumers must subsidise them. Once the subsidies go, after 20 years the German state of Branderburg did this, the operators cease trading and go bankrupt. There are also issues with the finance and debt structures behind these companies. It was something Eddie O'Connor of Airtricity warned a few years ago, I can't find the link just now. The risk is that your pension fund may eventually end up with the losses. Profitability is a big issue for these operations, the current environment of cheap finance may be masking a long term problem, that only becomes apparent after the original investors have managed to flip the company and exited. "Green finance" has a bubble feel to it especially when you hear terms like "gold rush" and "Saudi Arabia of wind" and Qatar bandied about.

World's largest offshore wind farm 'unprofitable' for Equinor, say government-funded researchers

As regards vertical axis turbines, the appeal is lower cost but the experiments are not promising and there is more work to get efficiency of the horizontal axis turbines. See College's green turbine uses more energy than it generates.

Interestingly, a lot of wind turbines cause the release of more CO2 than they save.

Installing turbines on hilltops in Ireland requires new service roads and foundation pads to be built. This drains the surrounding wet and peatlands releasing the stored carbon in the ground which have been there for millenia.

Sure it’s long term strategy, but has to start somewhere. Germany is moving away from Nuclear and will source green energy from elsewhere. The fact that they are investing means they will be pushing, they will also be pushing smaller European countries to do the same.

here’s more details

https://germany.embassy.gov.au/beln/hydrogen.html

I wonder why they'd choose that?

Funny when there's water contamination it's always the local authority sewage plant that's to blame not the humble septic tank,

Have you considered leaving? North Korea or Afghanistan should be attractive to someone who loves telling everyone else how to live their lives,

Your kind used to rule the roost when the RCC called the shots, now that avenue isn't open to you, you've jumped to the Green party, same narrow-minded little people, still trying to control the people only difference is Greta has replaced Jesus as the figurehead,

exactly, the germans learned that painful lesson way back in the 1930s with the hindenburgh disaster. hydrogen is still the same as it was back in the 1930s, some things never change ☺️

although it was very environmentally friendly, you could cross the atlantic using very little fossil fuels although running the high risk of being toasted