"Green" policies are destroying this country

It increased our reliance on imported via pipeline gas for the majority of time wind and solar are doing next to nothing

Which was entirely predictable and predicted by Irish engineering bodies

What to do instead?

• short term: stop throwing good money after bad and tell companies selling us wind lies to either deliver cheap green electricity or face extinction, also look into the all island auction system
• medium term: build LNG terminal to not be fully reliant on pipeline gas and avail of cheaper prices instead of being the last buyer at end of a long pipeline, try to squeeze every cubic meter out Corrib etc
• long term: nuclear

Or continue on the path where we spend a further 200bn + and still burn fossil fuels past 2050 unlike France who are set to completely phase them out by then

Less

especially as Moneypoint etc would not have been shut down

We be producing slightly more co2 but we are already producing 20-30x more than nuclear European countries, what’s a few more grams to add insult to injury

Right now at time of this post we are third most polluting in Europe while our 9GW of renewables is generating next to nothing (again)

Also let’s not forget that 15% of our current country’s gas usage goes to a Russian money laundering operation

https://www.irishtimes.com/world/europe/2026/03/24/from-the-shannon-to-siberia-how-alumina-from-a-limerick-refinery-enters-russias-weapons-supply-chain/

which is yet another bizzare green policy failure

That inter-connector to France was meant to come online this year, now it’s been delayed two more years and current cost is up to 1.62bn for something that just moves electricity (at a loss because physics) not generate any

It could have supplied about 10% our peak needs by us paying French for their clean green cheap nuclear

What’s more worrying is our single gas pipeline to UK which could break or be sabotaged or blockaded by Trumps friend Farage once he is in power and no LNG facilities to bypass this dependency

https://www.rte.ie/news/ireland/2025/0412/1507233-ireland-energy-supply/

could be the cleanest if anti technology and science Luddites stop arguing against doing what normal European countries like France and Finland do

Again not difficult to find if you look.

ESB has 600 MWh of battery storage that cost €300 million.

Our average hourly demand is 3.6 GW, so that 600MW would power the grid for ~10 minutes. For an hour it would require an investment of 60 minutes divided by 10 multiplied by €300 million = €1.8 billion. For the average day €1.8 x 24 = €43.2 billion. After day 1 your €43.2 billion worth of batteries is drained and no way to recharge them.

But there is no common energy market, if there was then prices would be the same, or at least similar, across the EU

What we need is to look at the situation in France where the grid was never privatised, EDF are wholly government owned and provide cheaper electricity to the grid which then gets passed on to the end users. France have a small amount of gas and other fossil fuel generators but crucially EDF sell their kWh's for less than the price of the more expensive fuels, they do not need to sell their kWh's for the same price as the gas wholesalers do, unlike here.

What you effectively have here is private billing companies who all buy the electricity at the exact same wholesale prices and earn massive profits, on the back of the EUs highest prices which is a completely bizarre way to run a crucial national grid!

If only it was a case of the abundance of the resource!

Here's the bathymetry around our coastline to 60m, From INFOMAR. A bit deeper than deepest ground based OWF to date. Not a lot of space to play with.

East coast, OK but unfortunately the engineering reality of the South, West, and North coasts is "very" different from the relatively "benign" environment of the South & Western North Sea or Taiwan. With a realistic maximum working/installation season of maybe two months, tops.

Going deeper. Contrary to some academics (seems our civil servants too), Floating offshore Wind is not a mature technology, still in its infancy, success to date has not been great. In nothing like the weather/sea states we have.

Floating offshore is currently double the cost of even the most expensive nuclear like Hinkley C

And only lasts at best 20 years vs 60 (so 3x that cost again!)

Absolute nonsense.

I have already shown your that for just one day at our present average daily demand grid scale batteries would cost €43.2 Bn and be drained after 24 hours with no means of recharging them. Day 2 and every day after when renewables are generating next to nothing you are sitting in the dark.

We are importing electricity to keep our emission down due to renewables failing so miserably they will not even reach 23% of the 51% reduction by 2030 we signed up to, where we will be paying fines from 2030 on-wards because of that failure.

Even disregarding the lose of our energy security, who are you going to import this electricity from and what will the generation source be, because it`s not going to be from renewables. The top 6 net exporting countries in the E.U. are, France, Slovakia, Czechia, Bulgaria, Sweden and Spain. All being able to do so because they generate using nuclear in their mix

We have high standing charges because our grid needs upgrading to carry renewable from far flung location all over the country to where the generation is needed using a grid that was not designed in the first place to do that.