Electricity Price Increase

I was just about to post this.

It's a disgrace when you analyse what is happening here.

1. This is a MAJOR driver of the cost of living, cost to do business here and the cost of producing anything in this country.
2. This is a cost that the government have a DIRECT input into via the ESB and various regulatory instruments.
3. This is coming at a time when the next budget will see another chunk of disposable and some indisposable income taken out of EVERYONES pockets.
4. I've said on other threads but these cuts are a lot easier to take for everyone if the costs of living and doing business are reduced. The government should be doing everything in their power to reduce these costs. Instead we see the opposite, first on fuel with these "Carbon" taxes, extra excise and now here.
5. The ESB, I believe have just dropped a cool billion to buy some northern Irish company - this appears to be how they intend to pay for it. What a fcuking joke............I would rather they didnt expand and passed the savings onto the consumer.
6. We now have more windfarms/renewable than ever, is this not having any impact on the cost of electricity at all?

If energy is costing so much to produce in this country we should
A: Get a few more interconnectors put in to England/Europe and buy far cheaper, mostly Nuc power from them (since we dont want to build on ourselves)
B: Run the ESB as it should be run. A not for profit organisation. As someone mentioned there was a half a billion profit last year......absolutely crazy....most of that is sunk in to foreign investments by the looks of it.

This really is making my blood boil, more than any paycuts/tax increases so far. Makes it boil almost as much as government induced rises in petrol/diesel/oil.....
When is someone going to call time on this joke.

this will come into effect in November

thebman wrote: »

I imagine this increase is because the regulator and the government believe that not enough people have switched to bord gais and that they have not done their job in creating incentive for people to move and have not created competition.

:rolleyes:

It is a moronic way to go about trying to create competition but our government only understands ripping people off.

I "think" this price rise will apply to Board Gais and others as well but not entirely sure.

The whole insane business is again the Greens exercising their single shared brain cell -- the one that seems to want to tax and regulate the human race out of existance in favour of bats and frogs.

From what I read the proceeds from this latest attempt at highway robbery are intended to further the environmental blight of wind turbines, and to pay for more peat-burning power stations when the same politicians have banned individuals from harvesting their own turf where their families have done for generations. What the Hell is environmentally sound about mass burning peat? IT IS NOT A RENEWABLE RESOURCE GORMLEY. It takes many thousands of years to lay down a peat bog.

So in the Green's strange world Paddy O'Reilly going out into the hills to cut turf for his fire, and even maybe sell some to locals, is unacceptable environmental damage, but a new ESP power station scalping the top off the landscape as they did at Edenderry if environmentally sound.

If ever I needed convincing that this country is run by corrupt, lying fanatics who may well be certifiable, I don't need it any longer. I have now taken up praying, since I suspect that all we can hope for to rid us of these cretins is God's lightning.

Energy regulator on the radio at the moment going on that "we have to raise 5% to encourage renewables, because we depend so much on imported fossil fuels" , if you ask me that's even more reason for us to build nuclear. Wind power will never cover enough of our power needs.

It's also a disgrace that the ESB make over 500million in profit. Let we the consumers have to take the pain. From what they are saying 87million from this levy will go the ESB alone.

taconnol wrote: »

Environmental blight of wind turbines? That's a new one. Yes, I suppose when you compare it to open-cast coal mining or oil drilling it can be quite..oh wait. never mind.

As for the turf-cutting for generations, they've had 11 years of a derogation from what is an EU Directive. The attempts to lay that one at the feet of the Green Party betrays a lack of understanding of the legislation involved.

As we have discussed before on another issue (the incinerator) perhaps a true life cycle analysis on wind turbines might be appropriate? It is not sufficient to state that they can generate X Megawatts of power free of charge using wind. There are the environmental costs of their raw materials and their conversion into turbines, the cost of installation and transmission lines etc. Environmental blight? In my view yes. If you sought planning permission for a 40 metre concrete tower on your land, would it not be likely to be rejected on visual impact grounds? However, if you want to install a hundred wind turbines in the landscape, that's OK even if their visual impact is appalling -- unless of course you consider a mass of concrete towers with huge propellors on top of them to be aesthetically pleasing.

In any case, wind power will never supply our energy needs, or even a realistic percentage of them, unless we cover the whole landscape with them. Even if we do, the extra unit price determined by the Regulator and the government to encourage them means that their output will always be expensive compared with other sources of energy (coal, oil, nuclear, or even, *Heaven forbid* waste incineration). So we pay more for something that is inadequate and unreliable. Wind turbines don't replace power stations because they cannot guarantee output.

I am aware that the private turf cutters have had 11 years of derogation from the EU. All I am questioning is how can the ban be supported on one hand while planning massive peat excavation for new power stations on the other? I would guess that the turf cutters will have and have had negligible impact upon peat bogs (they've been doing it for enough generations), while the new power stations will wipe out the bogs in a few tens of years at best. Are we to believe that the EU want individual turf cutters to stop doing it on environmental protection grounds, but are happy with the government plans for the ESB? If so then Ireland is not the only asylum run by the inmates.

Yes, I lay it at the feet of the Green party because they espoused the idea with considerable enthusiasm while imposing a levy on power supplies to encourage turf burning power stations. Banning extraction of (I'd guess) at most a few thousand tonnes a year in favour of hundreds of thousands of tonnes is, in my view at least, typical of the fanatical and unscientific attitues of the Greens.

As other posters have said in this thread, given that peat is the only natural resource we have and it is not renewable, then nuclear is the only realistic option and sooner or later the people and the government are going be forced out of their cosy green mindset and accept reality. Possibly at that point the Greens will suffer apoplexy and hide away in their caves for their bones to be found by future archeologists. That, for me, is an appealing potential outcome of nuclear power:)