Energy infrastructure

Market competition in Ireland. Don't make me laugh. A captured Regulator and impotent Competition Authority means Market Competition will never exist in Ireland. People will be charged until their pips squeak.

Times were better under ESB even though it was inefficient in that Electricity was delivered with no profit motive and at just above the cost of supply without the Government looking for a dividend to be returned. Now it is a Capitalistic dystopia rather than a true privatised free market.

The value of those Wind Farms halve overnight if Ireland starts paying International prices for Electricity generated from Wind. There will be Wind Energy Oligarchs in Ireland within the next decade. Eddie O'Connor was on his way to being one of them.

If the value of Wind Farms halve overnight then you can rely on the Government stepping in to guard these Captains of Industry and allow continued privatisation of profits and socialisation of loses.

This is already in some respects being done in that the projects are being de-risked with guaranteed pricing for decades. Who shoulders the cost of this if not the citizens of Ireland.

Building Wind Farms based on an assumption that the Proposers of these projects will continue to receive supernormal profits on provision of service is unsound. It introduces a systemic risk in to a business model and in time we will probably witness moral hazard associated with failed projects where the Proposers know they will just walk away from the project if things go awry…

I was once a believer. I was in the turbines up in Femanagh just after they were built. I drank the cool aid. That changed around 2008. The Irish Wind Energy project is just a scheme to enrich vested interests at the expense of the Citizens of Ireland and Eamonn Ryan with no built in ability to delay gratification in pursuit of his doom cult beliefs just amplified the cost to the people of Ireland.

Plutocrats don't move among us and little of their wealth reaches the great unwashed. We had paper Billionaires in Ireland already with wives and family in residence but supposedly living offshore to evade what little taxable remained outside of tax efficient vehicles for wealth conservation. If you knock on the metal door of those turbines nobody is manning the turbine. Trying to compare renewable energy industry to a domestic manufacturing base is a false equivalence.

The bloodstock industry driven by Sheiks has had more postive financial impact on Ireland than those native Wind Moguls will ever have even though I despise the horse racing industry and don't get me started on their tax breaks.

do you not remember the litigious patron of Michael Lowry TD who was in a protracted legal battle with Revenue Commissioners as to whether they actually lived in Ireland or not?