Yesterday the Sunday Independent reported that the Government received an urgent memo in recent weeks warning them of the protocols that will be used in the event of electricity blackouts this winter. Businesses will get a one hour warning before their supply is turned off. Households will get no such warning:
In a confidential briefing note for a Cabinet committee on climate change, ministers were told energy suppliers could be forced to introduce emergency measures if there are high demands for electricity during the colder months
Under worst-case scenario contingency plans, businesses will be given as little as an hour’s notice to reduce their electricity use or switch to generators while family homes will also be disconnected from the network.
The briefing document says “every measure” will be taken to avoid cutting off electricity.
Aside from anything else, the present power crisis is a very bad return on the massive and unprecedented investments that the Irish Government have made in wind power. Last year, the Government secured European Commission approval for The Renewable Energy Support Scheme (RESS). That scheme provides a minimum budget of €7.2billion to subsidise Green energy sources like wind, and solar. Much of the money is raised from the PSO levy on your electricity bill. More of it comes from general taxation, and a little bit more is borrowed. The present round of supports for renewable energy constitute the single largest subsidy from the Irish Government to any industry in the history of the state.
And for what?
We are investing this money, after all, in a source of energy which is not reliable. It makes little sense to build reliance on solar energy in a country with maybe three weeks of reliable sunshine. This year, which has been a bad year for wind, shows the folly of making your electricity supply dependent on the weather.
But the real kicker is the hypocrisy of supplying these subsidies while, at the same time, making an economic case against older, fossil fuel technology. When the Government closed down the Lanesborough and Shannonbridge power plants at the start of this year, one of the stated reasons was that it was no longer economically viable to subsidise the plants, given the relative inefficiency of generating electricity through the burning of Peat. That argument is true, incidentally: Burning peat is probably less efficient than burning coal, in environmental terms.
The problem is this, though: Economics have not been a consideration for the Government when it comes to Green energies. We all already pay higher electricity bills to pay for the fact that renewable energy is expensive and inefficient. Peat may also have been expensive and inefficient, but it was vastly less expensive, and infinitely more reliable, than the energy on which we are spending billions.
The truth of the matter, of course, is that Irish energy policy is not based on cost. It is not based on reliability, either. Neither of those two things have featured much at all in our national debates on energy for close to two decades. In that time, Ireland has focused only on how “green” our energy is. And that is a problem, because the greenest energy of all is to have no energy whatsoever.
Most voters, of course, are blissfully unaware of the sheer scale of spending on Green Energy. As a general rule, when voters are unaware of something Government does, that is because politicians share the view that if voters were to become aware, they would not approve. Most voters, you suspect, might prefer to see billions spent on roads, or schools, or hospitals, or childcare, or (heaven forbid) tax cuts.
But for almost 20 years, these subsidies have been the cost of buying the support of the Green Vote. And the opposition has raised not a whimper of objection. Perhaps the present crisis will prompt some reconsideration of how effective all that spending has been, but you’d have to be an optimist to believe that.