"Green" policies are destroying this country

Total nonsense on multiple levels. Lets take one aspect, electricity demand in this country is currently around ≈30–35 TWh/year

You want to switch everything to electricity as you claim demand will be at least 130TWh/year assuming that is even financially and materially viable within 20 years.

To do this you need stable baseload power and nuclear is the only game in town. A large nuclear plant (EPR / AP1000 class) has a capacity ~1.1–1.6GW with capacity factor: ~90%. Contrary to your claim nuclear generation is very reliable.

Let's say ~10 TWh per nuclear plant per year. At minimum we'd be looking at needing 4 nuclear reactors to provide baseload and probably more.

At least 130twh a year is wrong. You forgot that burning fossil fuels is an extremely inefficient way to generate energy. Electric heating and transport will use far fewer units of energy to do the same work.

Your probably right that we would need 4 hinkley c sized reactors because as you say, they are only operating 90% of the time, and you can't afford to lose 15% of your entire grid every time one reactor needs to be refuelled or maintained

Nuclear produces steady electric over 24 hours a day but our grid doesn't demand the same electricity 24 hours a day, do we'll still need storage and interconnectors and many of the same expensive grid upgrades we would need for renewables....

And we'd also need to continue to have the same fossil fuel infrastructure for the decades it would take to get even the first plant running, while we can continue to increase renewable infrastructure and age out fossil fuels from today.

Look. If Ireland announced a nuclear power program id back it as long as they didn't use it as an excuse to stop building renewable energy infrastructure. I won't hold my breath for the reasons that have already been explained on here over and over again

By 2050, entire islands population will probably be ~8 million people (we have a unified grid), there must be industry growth to support this. Therefore more energy will be needed. In a recent article an RTE economist failed to recognise Jevons paradox when he wrote "households increase their energy use when the home becomes easier to heat." Jevons back in 1865 noted the paradox relates to increased fuel efficiency leading to increased consumption of fuel back when steam engines where the thing, (still are for reliable electricity generation, cooling towers that Green propaganda likes to portray as "carbon" is water vapour).

With so much "cheap and available" electricity we will have to beat data center operators off with a stick to stop them coming here. Therefore even with efficiency gains, a fully electrified Ireland will likely need ~100 TWh per year by 2050—roughly triple today’s demand, account for industrial growth and demand for ~130TWh is not out of the question.

Your ideas depends on extreme over-sizing to make 100% renewables work, you need:

• Massive overbuild of wind (especially offshore)
• Large storage (days -> weeks, not hours)
• Heavy inter-connector reliance (UK & France/Spain)
• Demand curtailment (industry shutting down on low-wind periods, today the fall back to their own diesel or gas generators)

You’re not replacing fossil fuels. You’re replacing them with a combination of overbuild, storage and imports that still has failure modes during prolonged low-wind events. You are proposing huge capital expenditure (overbuild & storage), massive curtailment waste, increased system complexity and grid stress and even more dependence on imports when the neighbours also have low output. Pay attention to the neighbours they are currently enveloped in the same madness.

Ignoring economics the real challenge isn’t generating that energy annually, it’s guaranteeing supply during peak winter demand and low-wind periods, crucially when . . .

• Much of that demand is winter-peaking (heat).
• Exactly when solar is weakest and wind can be unreliable for multi-day periods.

It can't be a net exporter if our prices remain higher than elsewhere. Given that we already import on days with high wind and solar, I wouldn't bank on it changing in the future.

Its almost like the country isn't actually being run by 'greens' and the current government are paying lip service and failing to back the transition with urgent action.

Ah, so we can only export when it's windy here and nowhere else? Got it!

Have you run a single model to suggest that Celtic will do anything other than import?

Because any models that I've run suggest that the only times it won't be at full import are when it's on outage. Wind or no wind.

Ireland exported about 4TW of wind in 2023

Great. It's 2026 now.

You obviously didn't dig too deep in your hasty response, we were a net importer of just under 4TWh in 2023. Must've gotten the sign wrong again!

Why do we have the highest electricity prices in Europe?

Ok, so I get being angry on the internet is fun, but thats not what I asked you.

Explain how renewables have contributed to higher electricity prices over the last 5 years, and what would you have done to mitigate this