Environmental activists generally have no conceptual understanding of how to trade off environmental objectives against other policy objectives, either over the short not long term. Neither do ideologues on the other side.
I don’t disagree with that, but the comment was about the green agenda rather than the activists.
in that sentance you have explained succintly why countries with high amounts of renewables like Ireland have expensive electricity. The costs of all the infrasructure of installing wind and solar farms aswell as all the infrastructure associated with conventional power stations have to be borne by the consumer because the system has to be able to provide 100% power when there are no renewables available, its the cost of maintaining all that extra infrastructure that makes our electricity so expensive . Twenty years ago Ireland had very competitive electricity prices we were mid range in Europe because we only had the costs of maintaining a conventional power station grid not all the additional costs of wind farms and now solar farms.
Sure, but when do you want to pay the price for climate change? On your national electricity bill today while we transition to more secure local generation sources, or in natural disaster response tomorrow (well, today really!)? Or social upheaval/breakdown? Or in major global conflicts for fresh water resources?
Ireland generated 48% electricity from renewables in 2024 while the EU average was 47%. We don’t have high amounts of renewables, we have the average for the EU, yet our retail prices are the highest.
I’d hazard a guess that we have lower interconnection capacity than continental Europe?
No we didn't - electricity was always comparatively expensive here.
I remember distinctly reading an article about our relatively cheap electricity prices compared to our european peers around 25 years ago, that can't be denied now. Of course we didn't have nuclear which other countries had which was relatively more expensive and oil and gas prices were cheap then throughout the 90s and early 2000s as a result of the fall of communism and the full access of russian oil and gas on the global markets. Unfortunately we are now seeing the downsides to that thanks to Putin's idiocy.
one of the biggest players now in the energy market is BnM a state owned company, it has never made as much money since it essentially transitioned to wind farms. BnM doesn't sell electricity on the retail markets yet it is still able to make fat profits, so there is plenty of money being made even before it is sold on the retail markets, these companies need to levied with the cost of providing power when the wind is not blowing rather than that cost being pushed back onto the grid .
Only VERY briefly - when various fresh wells came on stream, and only briefly as they quickly were used up and fields such as Seven Heads failed to deliver on expectations completely.
While Nuclear provides constant clean renewable and safe power it is more expensive than wind and solar. The saving is found in the fact that if we had Nuclear we wouldn't need the extra back-up hydrocarbon burning capacity for when the wind isn't blowing. That said an integrated European Grid would also mitigate a lot of that problem.
Was listening to a podcast yesterday re German and UK grids, and the point was made that there has been a shift from wholesale fuel prices dictating costs to grid infrastructure investment dictating a much larger share of the costs than previously. It is important to remember that national grids are being reconfigured from monolithic on-demand generation capacity to increasingly distributed, variable sources of generation.