"Green" policies are destroying this country

All areas of the country will have a part to play in providing renewable energy, it will never just be Dublin.

There is no reason rural Ireland should be exempt and any infrastructure is far less impactful from a human pov there due to the low populations.

Dublin is Ireland's largest tourism hub.

Energy can be fed into the grid from rural areas, it does not need to be generated in urban areas in order to provide for urban areas.

The nimby example you make reflects your own attitude perfectly.

Wind farms anywhere, as long as they arent in my own rural backyard.

I am wondering ... how do we have renewable clean healthy soil, air, water, nature, ... without green policies ? 🤔

All fair points.

I dont believe Dublin Array has passed approval from ACP yet, either.

While those figures are quite high, no doubt, the alternative is spending similar money on fossil fuel power plants and then subsequently spending huge amounts of money on the fuel for this electricity generation. Remembering that if we let climate change get much worse there won't be anybody or any economy left

Do the seeds for this plant come as result of pollution of environment in China (out of sight out of mind right??) with whom we share same planet {global climate change right?} and their use of slave labour?

There are “green” policies and then there are “let’s outsource pollution elsewhere, and pretend we are green” policies {and let’s dump the problem on them culchies and not build near the main consumption center} which results in exponentially more environmental destruction both direct and indirect

That brings up another point

If a field of <insert crop> fails one just replows and replants something else, something that a good farmer be doing as part of crop rotation anyways

If the foreign investors whom are pushing these installations goes bankrupt you endup with fields full of unrecyclable glass/plastic and aluminium/steel and power lines and container sized batteries that can leak or go on fire ,

Aka an industrial wasteland and that contract you signed giving away rights to your land for decades gets sold onto vulture finds

That includes wind.

Solar it's Wexford, Dublin and Meath

Dublin has 17.5 hours of darkness during Winter so Meath has much the same.

Solar capacity factor for Ireland is dismal. 11% over the year but falling to 5% or less during the Winter when demand is highest. Even today in the middle of February it was providing nothing at peak morning demand and was only supplying 294 of the 5,964 demand at midday.

Solar also generates DC electricity which requires inverters to convert it to AC which we use and those inverters are now generally accepted as the cause of the April 2025 blackout that left the whole of the Iberian peninsula in darkness. Solar is not the answer to our problems.

https://www.greeneuropeanjournal.eu/land-of-conquest-solar-rush-po-valley/.

A long read, but an insight into what Italy are doing to restrict solar panels on productive farmland

We need to look at an alternative policy because the current proposed policy is not only working, it never will.

We were sleep walked into the present policy by the Green Party and media either to lazy or influenced by too many good lunches paid for by parties with financial interest. RTE`s environmental correspondent George Lee has no qualification in the field of environment. He got the job as he was staff and there was a vacancy. He is by qualification an economist who just spouts releases from the wind industry and I have yet to hear him even make an attempt to any effort at putting a figure to what spouts.

The Green Party sold this policy on there being this Klondike of "free" wind energy off our Western seaboard that would be harvested by floating wind farms with a high capacity factor which would not just provide all our requirements, but result in the State making massive profits exporting the excess via interconnectors. As anybody on the West coast could have told anyone interested, it was a fantasy as has been shown by the Sceirde Rocks €1.5 billion fixed turbine contract fiasco. Eventually in reply to another politician Eamon was forced to admit the technology required was not even invented for floating wind turbines in those conditions and would not be for decades if ever. The massive profits from exports via those interconnectors ? If anybody that believes at this stage that the interconnector to France, plus another being proposed from the same country will be doing anything other than exporting nuclear generated power to Ireland, I have a nice second hand bridge I can let them have cheap. The same goes for those other proposed interconnectors from the U.K.

2023 net imports of electricity via interconnectors was 9.5% of our demand. 2024 13.9%. First half of 2025 17.1%. We are importing electricity from the U.K. - themselves net importers who are getting cheesed off with the one sided arrangement - to keep our emissions levels down as the provider has to eat the emissions not the receiver. The only way we are still getting away with it is probably because the U.K. is claiming it is being generated by nuclear, or that other E.U. sham of wood burning being carbon neutral via their Drax wood burning plant. A sham that we are also getting involved in thanks to greens with a wood burning plant in Offaly and another due to reopen in Mayo previously shut because it was not financially viable with the wood coming from half way around the world before being transported half way around the country for both plants.

As to where we are now. We are following a 37GW offshore plus hydrogen plan that would still see us burning the same volume of fossil fuels in 2025 as we are now that would cost nothing much short of €300 billion at today`s costs that would treble the wholesale price of electricity. We got signed up on the back of this 37GW plan that was supposed to have us carbon neutral by 2050 that could not get us even close to to the 51% reductions in emissions for 2023 where the best estimates - if everything came in line by then, Sceirde Rocks included, - is 23%. That failure will see us paying annual fines until 2050 and well beyond.

At present we are not even running to stand still on emissions and are still being treated like mushrooms. The powers that be heralded 2024 as a great year for reduction of emission from generation where it dropped by 8.3%. What they failed to add is that 13.9% of our electricity was imported.

So what is my proposal for a 30 -50 year supply that would have us energy secure, other than nuclear, that we are already using as long as somebody else is doing the heavy lifting, that is financially much more viable when you consider it`s operational life span and capacity factor, I do not see any alternative. If anyone else does then be my guest. But if it is going to be battery storage, pumped storage, electricity storage via gas, carbon capture or anything else, then they are going to have to make a case based on financial viability and not just a nuclear is bad and green is good generalizsation. Not doing so would just be a waste of everyone`s time and effort.

Ah that’s what RTE called “wasted wind” this morning

While reporting on more prime agricultural land being converted to an industrial zone to hold Chinese coal power manufactured batteries, notice how this is surrounded by good land and not placed on a bog in background

That’s another thing that needs to be highlighted all these solar farms are not being placed on bog lands as those are protected, in this case the wind farm is on the bog but the storage industrial area is not

Above article from George Lee just highlights that we are taking up what used to be agricultural land, converting it into an industrial estate with fields full of containers that can leak into water table or go on fire {and manufactured using coal and slave labour in China of course} all to store a few hours of tiny amounts of energy more than doubling the cost of wind and solar

How this got past zoning and planning system is a mystery