"Green" policies are destroying this country

In theory smart meters should have allowed people to change their schedule to have cheaper electricity. But having tiny windows of cheaper electricity almost entirely offset by increased day rates feels again like anti consumer tactics.

Everyone has time based tasks or activities that must be completed and combined with ad hoc tasks. There are few people who can adapt their lives around cheap electricity rates. Typical families with children have to get up each weekday, have breakfast , be on the road on time, drop kids off at the creche/minder/school, get to work, collect the kids on time, cook, heat the house, prepare to repeat next day. All that requires energy to be expended. You can see this reflected in the daily demand curves for electricity. As a mass deployment it would only make sense as a trade off between cheap batteries/cheap rates so you can use the power when you need. Adding batteries to a house or premises adds risk, complexity, installation and maintenance costs. Operating costs + future replacement costs must be recouped from savings by the time the batteries need to be replaced to make any economic sense.

Misinformation from various unreliable electricity generation lobby groups claims wind and solar energy collectors are cheaper than thermal plant generation, using levelised cost of electricity (LCOE) as their metric. LCOE has everything to do industry profitability, however, nothing to do with the calculation of end user billing for electricity use. The metric completely excludes the cost of installing and maintaining extra support infrastructure, balancing and constraint costs due to adding more unreliable generation to the grid. The lobby groups like to issue press releases when the wind blows or sun shines, they were silent when they failed to supply electricity during the period in January above when Ireland hit record demand.

On an electricity grid, supply must always meet demand otherwise the system becomes unstable, disruption like experienced in South Africa, or Lebanon. Why electricity prices are so high in this country? supply must always match demand. Thermal plants consistently provide a quality product (on time delivery that meets the specification), while generation from unreliable sources are a low quality product, yet the operators are paid premium markup.

We are only seeing progression due to increased competition in the market.

What do you mean by this?

Laws can and will be changed. There is wiggle room in the Lisbon treaty, should the Irish state or others choose.

Such measures shall not affect a Member State's right to determine the conditions for exploiting its energy resources, its choice between different energy sources and the general structure of its energy supply, without prejudice to Article 192(2)(c).

With all the recent focus on the the recent American administrations push on tariffs, there is another overlooked impact from EU policies that must eventually affect pharmaceutical production in Ireland, the decline of the chemical industry across EU and once Great Britain. Lack of economic supply of raw materials will end production here.

• France pitches plan to halt decline of EU chemical industry
• Chemicals coming to an end in the UK.
• Europe's chemical sector 'is at breaking point' warns report

The report looks at how the EU’s chemical industry compares competitively with the US, China, Japan, Brazil, India and the Middle East, and the main cost and non-cost drivers for competitiveness in Europe. It concludes that the competitive position of the EU’s chemical industry has weakened on both cost and non-cost factors, including high energy, environmental and regulatory costs, through to administrative hurdles around innovation and human capital. The latter often resulting in delayed investments or decisions to invest outside of Europe.

Yeah, multiple bad decisions (Covid lockdowns, Green policies, and war, all compounding, leading to a policy of "degrowth" and deindustrialisation, or, if you prefer EU officials euphemism "beyond growth". China is the nation with the worlds largest chemical processing industry. Rest of the world is moving on with or without EU states. In Brexitland, the end of this sentence is a pretty tacit admission that renewables cause prices to go up.

Last night, a Government spokesman said: “We have a plan to make Britain a clean energy superpower so we can end our energy insecurity, and we are bringing energy costs for industry closer in line with other major economies by fully exempting eligible firms from certain costs linked to renewable energy policies.” source