David McWilliams: Why does Ireland have the most expensive electricity in Europe?

https://www.irishtimes.com/opinion/2024/10/05/david-mcwilliams-why-does-ireland-have-the-most-expensive-electricity-in-europe/

Posted by That_Technician_439

15 Comments

  1. We have the most expensive everything else in Europe why should electricity be any different?

  2. Dookwithanegg on

    We are on an island and the Celtic Interconnector hasn’t connected us up to the mainland yet.

  3. The article is pure trash. It’s peddling the myth that green generation will mean cheaper electricity for the whole grid. If that was true, subsidies, grants, carbon taxes etc. wouldn’t be needed

    Edit: Updated text to reflect I meant on a country level, not for an individual

  4. He doesn’t fully explain why we have the most expensive electricity. He says it’s because we import electricity. But so do other countries. So it doesn’t explain why our imports are more expensive.
    Instead the article quickly diverted away from why ours is most expensive towards looking at the class leaders, what we should be doing. But that doesn’t properly answer the question in real depth.

  5. WellWellWell2021 on

    When people started getting solar panels en mass what happens. The standing charges go up. It didn’t cost the utilities any more to maintain the network to those houses. They just put up the standing charges so they could make all users pay for the electricity the solar generators didn’t need to buy.

  6. Because FG politicians like Varadkar and Harris are ideologically opposed to renewable energy and politically are 1980s American republicans that are too narcissistic to realise how redundant they are.

  7. infinite_minds on

    Don’t we subsidise the renewable energy generators and guarantee them minimum prices?

    If 80% of our electricity was coming from wind farms and solar, would our home electricity bills actually come down significantly?

    Afaik, the price we pay is tied to gas prices, regardless of how the electricity was actually produced.

  8. Dry_Procedure4482 on

    We only have a connector with the UK heavily reliant on the cost of gas as we have next to none gas here which inflate our prices last I heard. There are plans to build one that connects to France which won’t be reliant on gas.

    If we can manage to get wind farms off the ground without the current pushback the plan I have read was was for France to rely on Ireland during autumn/wintwr months for surplus electricity generated by said wind farms and for Ireland in return to rely on France for surplus power during summer months, don’t know if from nuclear or from solar. Its was expected to make electricity here less reliant on gas from the connector to the UK and reduce cost of electricity.

    Unfortunately there is a lot of issues around getting it off the ground for various reasons. Off shore wind farms being protested by fishers and on shore by local residents.

  9. Accomplished-Try-658 on

    Weak willed politicians? 

    Chronic NIMBYism re: wind farms not helpful.

    Inability/reluctance to implement large scale infrastructure projects for decades.

    Us being short sighted enough to make it ILLEGAL to implement a nuclear programme is also a massive own goal.

  10. ya_bleedin_gickna on

    Nuclear is the way forward. It would be expensive to initialise but we could power most of the country with couple of 1gw reactors.

    Modern nuclear power is incredibly safe.

  11. This is extremely important because cheap energy is essentially a cheat code for higher growth and better standards of living- energy is an input cost into everything so if it came down then goods can be cheaper.

    A major problem with our renewables is planning. We are paying over the odds for renewables at our auctions, because the planning process is driving people away or increasing costs. Until that is fixed we will have this as a long term problem.