I think this government needs a wake up call. With 455,000 people unemployed, I.E living off less than 200 euro a week, How can they justify this 5% increase. I’m paying on average 700-800 euro per year in Electricity costs. Adding another 5% on top of this would push the bill to 735 to 840 Euro. If receiving the social welfare of 8,800 a year then it would work out to be between 8-9 % of this  yearly income would go to pay for electrical costs, now take out clothes, food, heating. and your barely living.

This TAX could wait a few years before being applied to an already over burdened tax payer  and the unemployed.

Everything I thought the green party stood for in IMHO  is flawed.

Eamon Ryan and Eddie hobbs were the guests, and made for quite an interesting debate. The Issues raised in the show were valid, and I hope that this might spark a wider debate. Its true that Ireland have the best wind coficent of any country in Europe, sitting out at the edge of the Atlantic has benefits, and this was highlighted, Ireland could get 40 % of  electrical power from Wind, some would say that this is too optimistic and that a more realistic 20% would be the more we would get.

Green energy in Ireland is not just about installing wind turbines everywhere, Green Energy is about having a diverse mix of Energy generation available in Ireland for the electrical grid, this must include all mixes of energy generation, wind, Solar, bio mass, hydro. I have left out nuclear power as alternative as the cost of building, decommission of a  nuclear power plant would cost Ireland too much,all the nuclear material would have to be imported, but more to the point nuclear is a finite resource too, there is only so much uranium in the ground, and it takes quite alot of energy to process. I think for ireland to go down the nuclear path would be a disaster and a massive waste of money.

Another  topic brought up was the issue of the electrical Interconnects between Ireland and the rest of Europe, so far we have 1 interconnect to England, but we would need many more, There is a plan in Europe to interconnect all countries so that supply of electrical power can be better generated and distributed, in other words we could sell electrical energy to the rest of Europe.At the moment this is not possible as it will take about 8 – 10 years for all the infrastructure to be put in place, but having all of Europe connected is no good if  local micro generation of electrical cannot get a grid connection. It was noted on the front line that getting a grid connection even when a transmisstion link is only a few kilometres away is next to impossible. This red tape will have to go  and any politics that get in the way of this would need to be side stepped, Eamon Ryan is in the best position to make the required changes, the ESB is owned by the Government and they should be able to make any changes necessary to implement this as soon as possible.

There was also a project called “Spirit of Ireland” I never head about this until last night, It’s an ambious plan to mix and match wind power to hydro power. I think the website would explain it better.

The main point of last night debate was the fact that fossil fuel is running out and we are at the end of cheap oil, the oil we get from now on will be expensive and dirty. So we do have a massive need to move ourselves away for oil, but just how we get there is another story.

Had the plan for this road gone through the city of Kilkenny would have being effectively cut in two. As Malcolm pointed out in his brief to “An Bord Pleanala” there is more effective ways to reduce traffic.

• Public transport.
• Encouraging the use of bicycles and the provisioning of cycle lanes.
• Park and ride facilities to reduce cars that come into the town.

Also with the down turn in the economy we should be trying to reduce the amount  project which consume money that could be better spend elsewhere. I think Investing in the future is what we need, and reducing our reliance cars, if only for town trips, would be a start.

My experience with builders and contractors is that they will try and get as much money for themselves. Ripping off the taxpayer once again (The grant is almost free money to them).

Will this become another (smaller) building bubble, I’ve never seen so many builders advertising insulation contracting before. Having the tax and insurance clearings will not mean that the contractor is any good at his or her job, I suppose there will be cowboys in this business too.

While I support reducing heating bills and in turn reducing C02, I’m not 100% convinced that it will work, I hope I’m wrong!

Houses built over the last 10 years were build with minimum code requirement in mind, even houses that where build just a few years ago barely pass the mark. Building codes in other countries have be constantly revised over the years to make best use of current technology our building code is outdated and was only recently updated.

Even taking best practices from say the Zero Energy Building code would have being a start. It seems that this is just putting a band aid over the problem. Builders have being let away with “murder” when it came to insulation and applying all the energy saving ideas that have developed over the years.

The transport sector accounts for a high proportion of CO2, It seems that in recent years car manufactures have gone the reverse of improving efficiency in the Internal Combustion Engine (ICE), producing largest and large cars, Sport utility vehicles (SUV’s). So making the car industry accountable for it’s product is a good measure, and I hope that with many other sectors, the tough CO2 emissions regulations will spur Industry to produce more greener products, consumers to think before buying inefficient products.

Even the food sector can reduce their CO2 emissions, bar the production and manufacture of food stuff, Flashy food packaging, Refrigerated, 100,000 air kilometres cesar salad, these have a tremendous CO2 emission record. I would imagine that as the CO2 (tax) is applied to these products, the cost of buying local (farmers markets) will seem cheap in comparison.

So bring on the tough decisions

The contents of the document is nothing new, even in 2005 its was pretty old news. I think everyone knows that oil is running out, The use of alternative fuel sources is a must. But the over whelming facts that are coming to light now is that fuel from food is not a good idea. The Green party as a whole has to support alternative source of fuel but also the strategy for getting there has to be in the policy, I read a lot of wishful thinking and a lot of statistics about running out of coal/Oil are dependence on Imports. our(Ireland) reliance on Fossil fuel to power most of our power stations. For the for see able future we(Ireland) need strong policies with regards to energy, and the action to back them up. I do know that we cannot wave a magic wand an instantly have the same life style that we have consume ever increasing amounts of energy.

The Transport policy is a bit better in details but it still falls down in places.The introduction of new tax laws for cars does not go far enough, in my Humble opinion I think that the sale of SUV should be make so expensive as to put people off buying them. I don’t just mean the price of the vehicle but Road tax should be adjusted upwards to hammer home the point. We cannot ban them as this goes against EU laws…

They support the metro project which looking at the estimate cost, will be about 6 billion for 12km of track,thats a whopping 500 million per km. Now that has to be insane! Reading a proposal by railusers.ie which would extend the Luas,DART Service to The Airport. I think it would cost rather less that 6 Billion have these services put in place.

Why is the Green Party supporting the metro which is clearly a waste of money ?

Why is their energy policy 3 years out of date ?

My faith in the green party as a whole is rapidly fading away!