"Green" policies are destroying this country

The problem with this is that the greens and their cronies in the wind lobbying industry won't be able to reconcile the greater good with their profits so will probably try to find some rationale to keep their intermittent technology in parallel.

Yep. All explained to you before. I've repeated myself several times, not doing it again. As I said last time, just go and reread the title of your own linked document: Energy Security in Ireland to 2030. Try to focus on this bit:

You don't seem to be able to comprehend that time doesn't end in 2030 in spite of me linking you to an extremely comprehensive 140-page document for the plans beyond that. It also baffles me how you think we're reaching net zero while still burning natural gas. However, nothing more I can do for you.

What was called conspiracy theory just a few months ago is becoming reality. According to this state will decide if you can use your heating or charge your electric car... It is starting in Germany but make no mistake it will be comming here too...

Thing is, this just amounts to throttling such devices when the grid is under substantial load. That doesn't mean your car isn't charging or heat pump isn't running, it's just simply at a reduced power level. And it's more a matter of the power infrastructure catching up.

You can buy multiple EVs that can comfortably do long journeys. A couple of years ago that was limited to Teslas. A Byd Seal for example can do a 510km on a charge. An Id3 starts at 330km but batteries go up to 550km. That kind of mileage is perfectly adequate for most drivers in Ireland tbh. Only point that needs improving is expanding of public charging points etc but equally most people's weekly journeys would easily be covered by home charging.

At the moment, the biggest determining factor on when more move is lower priced models which is 2025/2026 and a growing second hand market. Already the number of EVs on the road in Ireland has visibly increased in last year.

And the most likely time for people to be charging is at times where electricity usage is low is the night.

Maybe a few years ago it would be foolish to buy a second hand EV. But we know far more about the batteries now and capacity reductions in a year or two are pretty minimal. On average, they decline by 2.3% a year so a twelve month old Kona, cupra or id3/id4 can easily be picked up with low mileage. The long term approach is used batteries will likely be recycled.

In relation to weather, yep the cold can negatively impact however still Ireland has reasonably mild winters. Also there are options like heat pumps for plenty of EVs which counteracts much of this but even without, Ireland's climate is perfectly sufficient to get plenty of mileage out of an EV.

I'm aware of that, they're also not the only EV brand so plenty of options.

To be honest, I don't think we should be going all nuclear just as much as we shouldn't be going all renewable. Wind and solar most certainly has a place.

Electrify heating and personal transport, and power that from your nuclear baseload:

• That load is relatively steady and very predictable hour-to-hour, day-to-day, month-to-month, year-to-year
• Crucially, it is a critical load - any variation and people are immediately and instantly impacted (localised power cuts, up to more widespread blackouts).
• If that starts becoming a regular thing, people will start to get very annoyed, very quickly. Businesses will suffer.

When the wind blows and sun shines, generate hydrogen from it:

• Use that to decarbonise your heavy industry such as trucking, aviation and shipping.
• Wind is pretty predictable insofar as they can forecast how much of it they'll have pretty accurately, including the near-zero periods.
• You can thus plan your production output around these variations to a high degree of accuracy, and a halt in production due to a lack of wind has no direct impact on anyone.

Result: You need next to no grid updates and you're now pretty close to having carbon free energy across the board that is extremely reliable and without any reliance on as-yet undeveloped technology or infrastructure (grid-scale hydrogen production and generation).

That would easily take us to 2050 to achieve but a pretty sure fire way to be net zero by then.

Once you have that in place, then start looking at what an all renewable grid looks like by 2100 which will be around the time these new nuclear plants will be coming to major overhaul stage:

• You're starting from a good place because you're net-zero anyway.
• Your grid is reliable and you've decarbonised everything.
• If you move towards an all renewable grid, and at any stage you have to revert back, no problem - you're still staying within the realms of net-zero and can take your time to figure it out.

Sadly, on our current trajectory, we face having to re-engineer the grid that is used to taking a relatively steady flow from our large power stations in the order of 1-2GW and deliver it relatively close to where its generated, to being able to take many multiples of GW, often from far-flung and extremely remote locations, hauling it halfway across the country and ramping from near-zero to many multiples of GW in the order of a few hours. No grid anywhere in the world today has been designed never mind deployed to do that.

We have no guarantee it'll even work for keeping a modern grid energised:

• no-one has produced anything even close to the required size of hydrolisis plants needed
• nor has anyone come close to demonstrate how the required treatment of the vast quantities of water needed to feed said plant can be done,
• nor proven the practicalities of storing TWh of hydrogen for weeks on end without leaking or eating its way out (or going up with an almighty bang),
• or how to run a power plant on hydrogen without producing massive quantities of NOx - the exact emission diesel is currently being slated for.

Yet we want to turn our country's electrical grid into one large guinea pig for the world to sit back and watch armed with a blank cheque and nothing more than crossed fingers it all works out in the end with absolutely no clear indication it will.

And if we get so far down the road only to realise it's a dead end, the only way back is to roll back on our emission reduction targets.

OK - so there's planning issues, likely objections, etc. Renewables, we are told, are already being held up by these objections and the proposal from many is to allow them effectively fast track (or override) traditional planning process. If you're going to do that, surely you allow "carbon free energy sources" as opposed to specifically just wind and solar, right?

They say gas is renewable too don't they? And burning biomass is green :-)

First of all, it's not 'deciding when you can charge' or heat your home. It's allowing the grid operators to put conditions that allow grid operators to limit the bandwidth to certain devices when there is acute shortages in the grid. The limits are set to throttle excessive use during times of shortages, but the limits are set at reasonable levels that will only affect especially heavy users at times of acute shortages.

This is a sensible compromise that gets rid of the excuse that the grid operators are using to delay facilitating new connections to the grid.

What will the future grid look like? With more and more new BEVs supporting V2G, having BEVs connected to the grid will serve as a really useful buffer and will reduce the requirement to curtail electricity. For those who aren't connected to the grid, smart charging will be ubiquitous, BEV owners will be able to charge their cars for much cheaper when there is a surplus of electricity (any time it's windy at night, wind power is currently curtailed, as BEVs become more widespread and smart chargers proliferate, this wasted capacity will be used to charge BEVs

Then we will have millions of BEVs from commuters coming home from work, in time for the peak power demand in evenings, plugging in their almost full BEV to the charger, and many of them, supplying energy to the grid when it's most in demand, and then recharging that battery at night when the energy would have been wasted and the tariff is cheaper....

Rather than waving around Ryan`s latest waffle why not do at least a little research or even read back through this thread.

As has been posted here many times November 2021 The Good Information Project/Think Ireland did just that.

A survey of 1,200 people on the question "Should Ireland build a nuclear power station to increse clean energy supplies" found a 50/50 split. 43% yes 43% no with the remainder unsure. In the 18 -24 year age group 60% said yes. If you are looking for a political party supporting nuclear then from that survey it should be the greens as that is the age group it garnered the highest percentage of its vote from in the last general election.