"Green" policies are destroying this country

Burning Coal! What would that do to the environment and if you don't care what about the penalties we have to pay to the EU on emissions?

No error whatsoever.

You appeared to believe that 9% on climate change in an opinion poll was relevant in some unexplained way to the result of the election.

It wasn`t. The only percentage of relevance was the 4% whose FPV it influenced.

Stop with the pointless nonsense. You pointed it out as being 5th at 9%.

When it came to how people actually voted the percentage was less than half that 9%.

Will you ever cop yourself on and stop wasting my time and cluttering up the place with your pointless nonsense.

You posted that climate change and the environment was 5th. at 9% as if it had some relevance to the result of the election. It didn`t because it was an opinion poll. The poll that is relevant to the election is the 4% of those that the exit poll showed voted in the actual election.

How you are incapable of understanding that I have no idea, nor do I care. So go away and harass somebody else as I have better for doing than wasting any more of my time on your waffling and snide little remarks to other posters in reference to me. A practice that has incurred censure and bans here in the past as far as I recall.

Would be higher still if it wasn't there.

Ireland is entirely dependent on fossil fuels. A power system that is going to be completely absent for extended periods — and you don't know which periods — is always going to be dependent on fossil fuels. We can quibble about the word "entirely". Our economy and society would entirely collapse without power when we need it. I would say that makes us entirely dependent on reliables which are mostly fossil fuels at the moment.

As for price hikes due to supply disruptions, sure, that's a feature of all supply chains. The fact of the matter is that European natural gas prices returned to normal pretty quickly after the initial shock of the Ukraine war. They had already been high six months before the outbreak of war due to Russia throttling supply through the Yamal-Europe pipeline, plus increased global demand with the economy rebounding from the pandemic. The normalisation of prices despite the loss of Russian supply is quite reassuring. It couldn't have happened just a few years ago, and is the product of an increasingly mature global LNG supply chain. It has made us more resilient to the machinations of a bad actor like Russia.

Compare that with the cost of new wind energy. Like most capital intensive businesses it is severely impacted by the inflation of the past few years and hasn't returned to "normal". Prices increased by 40% last year (source: Vattenfall). It also is subject to the whims of global supply chains. Just this week, China is firing warning shots across the bows of the tariff-happy US by restricting exports of rare earth metals. The EU is in dispute with China about EV and battery dumping which could lead to more tit-for-tat trade controls. The future for European renewables businesses is probably more uncertain than the fossil fuel supply.

With natural gas prices near historic norms, you're going to have to find a different reason why Ireland's electricity prices have been going up inexorably with increasing renewables penetration. It's not a big mystery. The experience has been the same in many other places.

First point to make is that we don't use oil to generate electricity by and large. Some plants can use natural gas or distillate fuel. Oil accounts for about 5% of generation (and that's quite high compared to global averages).

However when it comes to fossil fuel prices, whether oil or gas, the point about being at the mercy of suppliers is a complete red herring. Big Oil doesn't set the price of oil or gas. That is done by global markets who watch supply/demand imbalances like a hawk and trade on the outcomes.

It's funny that people are so prone to believing in rapacious price setters (which don't exist) when it comes to fossil fuels, but don't see the predatory investors behind Big Wind. I say "predatory" because they prey on governments' willingness to agree strike prices for delivered power that are guaranteed for years ahead whether the power is needed or not.

I blame the government more than the investors — the latter are just doing what capitalists do, while the former are engaging in market distortion. Fortunately those sorts of incentives are gradually being rolled back, but it has also exposed the fragility of the renewables industry since much of turns out not to be viable without ongoing public largesse.

Not adding renewables into the mix will result in lower prices? That doesn't make sense at least long term.