| more and more cost-of-living protests
They must have been real quiet. Most the protests are related to how expensive it has become to rent / buy in this country.
Ireland has encouraged and allowed a huge number of data centers to be setup here and been very slow to implement legislation for other green forms of energy generation. We don't need dirty forms of energy production here like coal and peat just to make energy cheap. Relying on Oil and Gas leaves us hugely at the whims of the international markets.
| now importing most of our energy
14.0% of its electricity in 2024 according to https://www.seai.ie/data-and-insights/seai-statistics/key-pu...
> Ireland has encouraged and allowed a huge number of data centers to be setup here and been very slow to implement legislation for other green forms of energy generation. We don't need dirty forms of energy production here like coal and peat just to make energy cheap. Relying on Oil and Gas leaves us hugely at the whims of the international markets.
It's grid capacity more than anything which is the issue, and (like many other Irish issues) this is downstream of failures in our planning and permitting process.
Agreed. As I said in another comment it is a policy decision to rely on market forces while making little effort to reform the planning process. We should be a world leader in wind energy but the planning process holds us back hugely.
Governmens around the world trying to shift blame from gtid caoacity managers (so, themselves) to users because "they just consume too much".
In no other industry are providers ever worried about selling too much.
You always need some backup when the wind does not blow, although in Ireland it blows almost everyday. A deal with the UK (although Milliband has idiotically jumped way too far on the green bandwagon and prevented North Sea drilling) should guarantee that.
Real estate and energy prices are both two sides of the same coin and included in the cost of living...if you aren't aware?
Also, both of these problems are caused by the same thing: NIMBY-ism.
Modern western governments generally hate people new building new things. Whether its a renewable energy project, a fossil fuel plant, a housing development, etc. It's all the same problem.
They are the same side of the coin but one has a much larger effect then the other depending on where your are. Energy has always been expensive in Ireland and home insulation poor (though there have been lots of grants)
| NIMBY-ism.
True but it effects are much worse due to poor planning laws