"Green" policies are destroying this country

10,000 acres is not a very big area you know - about 4000 hectares or 40 square kilometres. That's say a piece of land 10 kms in length by 4 km in width.

If that's all we need for solar for the entire country, it would have minimal impact spread over say 20 sites or whatever.

You must have completely missed where I replied to your previous "roof space" comment?

These are not plans for "roof space" rather industrial scale planned installations on agricultural land either in process or awaiting full approval.

Make up your mind - what area is required for solar farms? To put in context again, County Dublin is one of our smaller counties and is over 900 square kilometres. If your minimum figures above are correct, that's 20+ times the area needed. Cork is 7,500 square kilometres, 180 times the area you quoted.

So 40 sqkm is nothing really. As for hedgerows and trees, we have extensive lands where these have already been pulled out. Never mind cut away bogs. And of course, Dublin Bay if they were on floating platforms.

I'd suggest you go read up on it. The 10,000 has been stated as the minimum needed. Capiche?

Loads of brownfield locations out there which would be better utilised for solar farms imo.

As for the rest I leave it with you.

Why not take up a few hundred acres for housing too?

Public parks are what they are for a reason. Moment you start to erode them for one thing, might aswell just tear it all up

And this means what to me? State owns Phoenix Park, you can sort all your Dublin housing and energy issues by building huge tower blocks with solar panels and turbines on top. No need for big pylons and cables dragging power from every corner of the country, throw in a couple of Data centres and a chippie and you'd never need to leave the house Broke, Green paradise with a Foxconn theme.

Hasn't been signed off on yet, July 2022 is supposed to be the start date.

https://www.irishexaminer.com/farming/arid-40818933.html

And just before the usual advocates arrive with the same old 'this proves we need even more renewable energy generation' or wtte - just one very windy weekend in late January-early February this year provided for approx 85% of Irish electricity demand via renewable energy generation

So it's not that we don't necessarily have enough renewables -it's the fact that our weather often fails to provide for stable and reliable renewable energy generation. And a wider geographical spread of renewables ain't going to change that either as has been seen in the poor performance of renewable energy generation all across Europe this winter.

Edit lol See below

The lack of perspective here is not going to age well. Faux concern over hedgerows won't look so good as climate change causes the collapse of eco systems all around the planet.

The faux concern about energy prices or energy shortages will be laughable in light of the global food shortages we will see in a 3 to 4c world

Society can easily live without reliable electricity. A few days without food and clean water and,and it becomes existential.

Unless you value convenience now above survival in 30 years, We absolutely have to leave most of the oil and gas underground. This means we need to invest in our future now while we can still afford it.

Leave it until later on, when our resources are already massively depleted by the mounting climate impacts and we're contemplating the unthinkable.

Nobody will care about petty arguments in the irish green party manifesto as there are a billion climate refugees asking us whether we let them die or share our diminishing resources with them

Solar and wind are excellent complimentary technologies. We also need storage. Which can be grid scale with existing proven technologies or distributed by encouraging end users to have some amount of local storage.

A network of smart grids with storage is so much more efficient than the current permanent crisis mode that the national grid has inherited.

Ah krist not this again. And were straight back into your apocalyptic disaster movie scenario again despite the IPCC never stating that civilisation was about to collapse.

And I guess because of that all bets are off and we get every excuse to destroy the environment with impunity because your own take on the issue