Gas price on the way up

Ireland is going to be left with some difficult choices in the short-term as the transition to a carbon-free economy will take time.

Do we continue the decommissioning of Moneypoint? We could reverse it and lessen our reliance on gas, but that will increase carbon emissions.

Do we build the LNG storage facility in Shannon to lessen our dependence on Russian gas?

These are crucial questions. We could lessen reliance on Russian gas at the expense of emissions in the short term, but we would really need to ramp up grid storage of renewables as well as off-shore wind capacity to eliminate it in the longer-term while also meeting carbon targets.

The Greens may be uncomfortable with some of these decisions, making the government somewhat less stable.

hopefully current events will accelerate our changeover to renewables, but this wont be easy, outages are increasingly likely now....

EUR is down 5% vs the $ in a month. So that’s 5% “extra inflation” on top of exploding commodities. And I have the feeling there’s a lot more downside to come. Western welfare economic model simply has no future.

simply put, don’t hold EUR cash unless there is a believable change of policy within the ECB. Just can’t see it happening, big government and debt making is too entrenched.

I find it odd that there's no message coming from the government to try and get people to use less gas if possible. Most people could turn the temperature down in their houses and use less heating.

Not sure what it's like in McMansion land but here in the big smoke pretty much everyone seems to have gas heating.

They sure don't, that's why gas/petrol hikes wont affect us as badly as the 7 cars per household bungalow brigade.

No need for that.. being a nasty **** isn't clever or sophisticated no matter where you live.

They really tried to hold back roof - top solar. They are still holding it back with their piss poor to non existent feed-in tariffs.

It could replace a significant portion of what is now generated with gas. Even a small install of 1kW panels on 1 million houses would put a good dent in it. Yet the ESB insists on holding it back, industry big wigs don't like the notion of ordinary folk getting paid to produce electricity, that's only supposed to be the preserve of big foreign investment corps.

There is a brigade for them now?

What happens if someone in the household acquires an extra car or one breaks down? Does their brigadier general kick them out?

We have oil heating. Boiler is finished. It wont last more than another month im thinking.

Trying to decide. Should we go for a new gas heating system as gas is on the road, or just get a new oil burner and stick with oil.

You can start by forgetting about the midlands peat burning stations. You do realise that the principal reason these inefficient plants have been decommissioned is that Bord na Móna has practically stripped any raised bogs of value. There's no fuel left worth burning in them. The great carbon sinks of Ireland raped for little benefit other than the promise of seasonal work to keep politicians constituents happy.

That's not strictly true. They stopped producing because they couldn't win any energy auctions as they were too expensive to run, even with the PSO levy.

They served their purpose. They should've been replaced with bio energy stations, but the plan for getting them fuel was half baked to say the least. It was mad that they were planning on trucking fuel to them when barges up the Shannon or rail were obvious alternatives that could've been made work with a little imagination.

Bring back the minister for hardship. ration books, inflation, the cycle repeats