"Green" policies are destroying this country

I lived close to one for while no issues, great jobs for areas and cleaner than most of Dublin living next to a trash incinerator and and oil power plant whose stacks Dubliners are proud of

Now let’s delve into the psychology of why you don’t want to live next to clean power and want to convert the countryside and food generating farms into industrial estates

Funny how the greens are green as long as the problems are out of sight and out of mind

Just like slavery and coal use in China for technology that given us dirtiest and most expensive electricity in Europe while becoming more reliant on gas producers

France currently boasts a cumulative installed solar photovoltaic (PV) capacity of 31.1 GW, having recently overtaken Italy to become the third-largest solar market in Europe. Finland has a smaller but rapidly expanding solar footprint, reaching over 1,000 MW of installed capacity with record deployments of large-scale industrial solar

Because it’s cheaper to convert fields to industrial use than put on roofs and as can be seen our Green friends above only support “Green” when it’s in someone else’s backyard and not theirs

I have no issues with rooftop solar, Dublin alone is 120 square kilometres

Meanwhile the factory that exports aluminium to Russian war machine and burns 15% of the country’s gas and dumps 200,000 tons of toxic waste into Shannon every year on top of co2 emissions is now openly blackmailing the government

Yet another green policy failure

Yep plenty of massive sheds around the place

I see solar in France was mentioned above, what the poster also failed to mention is that France has strict laws and restrictions on solar being installed on agricultural land (which would make field installed solar in Ireland unviable) and instead like a few European countries been pushing for rooftops and car parks to be covered with a “roofs first” policy similar to Netherlands and Italy

https://www.pv-magazine.com/2024/04/09/france-issues-new-rules-for-agrivoltaics/

Italy is an interesting one

• they also banned solar on agricultural land as it had negative impacts on food production, tourism and made a lot of people very angry, no one wants to see a good chunk of their country converted to an industrial estate with nothing to show for it
• They are massively reliant on French nuclear power
• They import loads of gas and are not far behind us when it comes to expensive electricity prices and dirtiest co2 emissions
• they are currently undoing their ban on nuclear power as Italy had a law similar to ours

Governments in the E.U. are getting it in the neck from industry and the zero emissions mandates.

Renewable companies are holding governments as hostages due to those mandates dictating strike prices and terms and industries are seeing job losses due to companies moving to countries outside the E.U. that have cheaper energy charges.

In terms of weather it could easily be looked at as the perfect storm. Which is ironic when you consider that renewables are weather dependent.

yeh great idea to be fair, tho only 100 meters laid so far, French want to do same if it works out

https://www.swissinfo.ch/eng/climate-solutions/switzerland-turns-train-tracks-into-solar-power-plants/89227914

https://www.groupe-sncf.com/en/innovation/solar-power-between-rails

I don’t think it’s reasonable for the Govt to 100% fund the installation of large array solar panels, especially for profitable businesses, when these arrays are tax deductible and generate an income. No issues with the Govt socialising the cost if they also socialise the income. I doubt that proposal would get a lot of support even from among the greenest of the greens.

I built a house 15 years ago and was required by building regs to self fund a minimum level of insulation/ building standards. Not only was no grants available but the stupid regs disincentivised the installation of a heat pump as it was considered less environmentally friendly that an oil boiler and wood burning stove owing to the dirty grid. This was even though a €5,000 grant as available to install one a year or 2 before I built. Talking about the Govt and its environmental experts not knowing its ass from its elbow.

What I can’t understand is why the latest regs don’t mandate the installation of solar panels and indeed heat pumps for new builds given that thy are supposed to be such a no brainer. I can only think it’s because there’s so much money to be made by the renewables industry from retrofitting them a few years down the line. These days the renewables business is extremely profitable and needed to be milked for all its worth

His point is that new houses already have fairly steep building requirements which have driven the costs for a brand new house in middle of nowhere estates to 600k+ it seems

Having the owners add panels later suits the banks too, they can bypass the lending limits that manner you see 😉 by lending them with another loan at a higher rate too

I shudder to think at how a young couple can even afford these homes these days

they can only lend out 3-4x salaries so that puts a cap on what people could borrow

Hence making houses even more expensive means smaller pool of homes can be bought

So having homeowners come back for more loans later suits the banks quite well and bypasses the limits which would apply if new homes become even more expensive

you are missing the point let’s make an example

Young Couple on 100k combined, slotting figures into mortgages.ie to that’s 375k mortgage max

Let’s say somehow miraculously there’s a new house in their area for 375k

Now under your proposal with even stricter building requirements that house is 400k now putting it out of their reach instead of them buying it for 375k and returning to the bank for separate loan at later time for solar etc

We are already at a sport where all these new requirements pushed new homes out of reach of people, yeh let’s make the situation even worse /s

I think it’s you that’s missing the point. Basically you’re saying the cost of building a house, including all the spend on discretionary nice to have stuff is not negotiable but the cost of a few solar panels which will actually save the owners money in the medium term is the straw that breaks the camels back! BTW the old farmers haven’t done so bad out of the high cost of housing that you’re so worried about. Maybe if farmers or landowners in general tempered their demands for killer profits on selling development land then them poor stretched families might be able to afford their panels.

You seem to be obsessed with pandering to the banks. That’s what got us into the shoite we found ourselves in the noughties.