Energy infrastructure

His analogy is very apt. If you don't see the bigger picture that is your fault nobody else's.

Outside of windfarms but more generally I'm from a rural area, and I regularly see people protesting against anything/everything "strategic" or of national importance, but there's almost no acknowledgement of the things they get from the state that someone else must provide or live with. I also see it in urban areas with people protesting against housing and density. It's just NIMBYism really.

Of course nobody wants to live next to a turbine or a battery farm or substation. And nobody wants to live next to a new very dense housing development on what was a green field. But we need to have these things.

One thing the state could do better in general in rural areas is linking local amenities to new national energy infrastructure: new wind farm goes in, direct funding of local playgrounds etc. At the moment it's a bit all cloak-and-dagger with undisclosed sums going around. Another thing that could work well would be if a very small % of the wind farm profits could be directed back to the local community: I suspect that a lot of negativity could dissipate very fast. As it is right now, only the landowner really gains. I think you'd find a lot more goodwill if they were "our" turbines, if you know what I mean.

As a secondary point, the type of surroundings we have in modern day rural Ireland are not really representative of the "natural" environment at all. There's a lot of large one-off houses surrounded by tar, there's a lot of cattle ranching, etc and even though people seem to think of these as "natural" they are also the trappings of modern industrial technology.

My neighbours cry foul about "industrial equipment" (energy infrastructure) and it kind of feels unreasonable to me because I regularly experience fairly heavy and noisy and disruptive farming equipment. I know people draining bogs and clearing trees with no consultation. But we all just put up with those because the industry is agricultue.

The majority of windfarms built to date are not on intensive farmland or other low nature value areas eg. Ireland has more windfarms built on peatlands than any other country in the EU and has already been slapped down several times by the ECJ on this matter concerning damage done to same.

Actually Offaly was consistently in the top 5 for wind (top 3 on a couple of occasions) since Dec 24 up until August of this year. Prolongued outages at a couple of the bigger wind farms since July caused a drop in the rankings.

I suggest you read up on the "Go to areas" for renewable energy production in the relevant EU Directive adopted just last year . It specifically instructs goverments to plan for such projects in "low impact" areas - as countless examples show, current state policy does nearly the exact opposite…

Not going to be popular with some , but would it be possible to erect wind turbines on undrained bog , ( or currently drained and due to be re wetted bogland )

If they can anchor turbines to the sea floor , surely it must be possible to cross bogland , a lot of tracked machines can have very, very low ground pressure ,

And it's possible to build temporary bog roads,

There might have to be a limit on the height of the mast or size of the turbine , but could be a way to increase usable wind resource , avoid as many houses as possible, rewet / restore bog lands ect ..

"We're seeing a rooftop solar revolution, backed by the €1,800 SEAI grant. A grant which I’ve confirmed will stay in place. With 28,000 installs last year and over 33,000 expected this year, momentum is strong and we’re committed to supporting it."

From Darragh O'Brien twitter.

Pretty good numbers. Over 600 a week.

Is labour the major cost?

Sodium batteries are coming to market soon so cost of batteries will continue to drop at least.

33,000 a year is a good number.

Apparently just over a million homes are suitable for solar so if we could increase to 50,000 a year installations, we'd have every roof done in 18 years (100,000 already done).

Grid scale batteries also will be a big deal.

We produce a surplus of wind energy lots of nights.

We should be storing all that.