Just back from a couple of days in Spain looking at solar parks. The Spanish government has taken its Kyoto obligations quite seriously and is looking for 500Mw of installed power to come from photovoltaic solar parks. To do this, they are offering a staggering 44 cents per unit for electricity from these parks, and individuals are encouraged to own 100Kw units, usually within a larger solar park sharing maintenance, grid connection etc.

En route to look at these solar parks, we passed through a forest of wind turbines covering hills stretching all along the east coast. This is a tourist country, with wonderful countryside. Were they obtrusive? Beauty is in the eye of the beholder. I quite liked ‘em.

But the solar parks are really impressive. Huge dual axis trackers keep the solar panels directly facing the sun, and each 100K park consists of about 14 of these units on a 2 acre site. With little wear and tear, these will continue quietly producing power for between 25 and 40 years.

But 44 cents per Kw H? Well, there is a catch - the price is indexed at half the rate of inflation, so this falls in real terms over time. The upside is that the scheme has resulted in a lot of innovation, and this is making Spain a centre of excellence in solar photovoltaic development.

If 1% of your power comes onto the grid at 44 cents, per unit, it pushes the average price of electricity up by about 3.8%. Is that a high price to pay if it funds innovation? Could we stomach something like this to promote the development of wave / tidal power in Ireland?

What happened afterwards was the interesting bit. The Greens are now in government, and I’ve had emails and phone calls both for and against that decision, though the “for” vote was in the majority. It isn’t a black and white decision. B&W decisions can be made in 10 seconds - the debate on this one in the Mansion house went on for 8 hours. I voted in favour for a number of reasons;

1) Fianna Fail were going to be in power anyhow, with or without the Greens. The only difference is that instead of being beholden to a few local interest independents, they are now also beholden to a Green agenda. Had it been a choice of backing either FF or FG, then it would be a different matter, but the figures dictated that FF were going to be heading up the next government.

2) People mostly voted Green because they wanted Green policies implemented in relation to climate change and energy. Considering that the Greens had only 6 seats to FF’s 78, they got a good deal - two key ministries and agreement to reduce CO2 emissions by 3% per annum.

Some say that people voted Green for change. That isn’t necessarily the case. The Greens never promised not to go into government with FF, and as a result many of those who wanted change voted FG first, Labour second and then Green. But remember, that given the numbers at the end of the election, FF were home and almost dry. The most change you could have got was the coalition that actually emerged.

3) I just don’t think there is five years to spare not having Green policies on energy and climate implemented in Ireland. Another five years building shoddy housing, gas fired turbines etc.

OK, we didn’t get everything we wanted on Tara, Shannon and numerous other issues. But staying out wouldn’t have saved Tara or kept US soldiers out of Shannon. The best we can hope for is that in government we will have an effect on future decisions. Lets give it time.

While all parties have similar promises on healthcare & education, none of this will be possible unless we prepare our economy to deal with dwindling oil supplies and a corresponding rise in energy costs.

I do not believe the main parties will meet some major strategic challenges facing Ireland today - not just rising energy prices, but also the fact that within the next few decades Ireland will have to reduce its carbon emissions by at least 60% under international climate change treaties.

We can’t do this by building motorways as proposed in the National Development Plan. We need to develop renewable energy from wind, wave and tidal power as well as switching some less profitable farmland to energy crops and artisan foods for local markets. In the case of the islands, I would like to see immediate experiments in short-rotation coppice woodlands being developed so that houses could get their heating from locally produced fuels, where possible using log gassifying stoves or wood-chip boilers rather than pellet stoves. Where there is a cluster of houses, CHP (combined heat and power) plants might produce both heat and electricity (our gas and coal-fired plants waste over 60% of their energy by not being able to utilise waste heat).

To my mind, local fuel production and consumption - particularly on an island - makes a lot more sense than producing diesel from rape seed for cars, while continuing to put diesel into our central heating tanks.

On the mainland, we need to provide fast, clean, efficient public transport and I believe we should consider rebuilding the West Cork railway, at least as far as Skibbereen.  A 2005 study showed that this could be done for between €200M and €450M depending on what sort of freight it would carry - that’s between four and nine times the price of a government jet. A decent public transport system supported by a mini-bus service on feeder routes would enable us to move towards reducing our car dependency.

I often thought that electric cars would be ideal for island transport - my electric car is silent, smooth and requires no petrol / diesel or maintenance and can be recharged on off-peak electricity. Furthermore, were the wind turbines to be re-constructed on Cape Clear for example, car batteries might help to smooth the peaks and troughs of the grid that present an obstacle to integrating wind on the grid. Load management systems can be developed to manage the times when domestic appliances are used and batteries charged / discharged, and I believe an island like Cape Clear could become a micro-community within which these systems could be designed, developed and perfected.

These are all changes that would improve our quality of life and create jobs, while enabling our islands to participate in putting Ireland at the forefront of renewable technologies. If we don’t start now, I believe that Ireland faces a recession under which it will be impossible to maintain even the existing poor standards of health care and education.

I don’t believe in pre-election promises - they are made to be broken, but this is an indication of the direction we need to take.

Would you like to support this idea by putting a poster on the window of your car? We have a few mini-posters that you can put on your car window. You can download them here and print them on your inkjet.

Yikes! Its seven days away, there are 71,000 people in the constituency and I’ve only (!) shook hands with a few thousand of them. I can’t possibly get around the whole constituency. We don’t have a team of councillors and citizens who believe we got them their council house / pension / bus pass / planning permission and are willing to beat the streets on my behalf. So sorry blogs are so intermittent, I’m off!

Duncan Stewart is coming to Bantry tomorrow night (Monday 30th) as keynote speaker in a debate between candidates from all the main parties. The debate will be chaired by Paul Cunningham, RTE environment correspondent.

Regardless of your political allegiance, this is an opportunity to influence the policy of all T.D.s on this issue. The meeting will start at 7.30pm on Monday (30th) at the Westlodge Hotel in Bantry.

Why would developers bother? The current standards aren’t even policed. When SEI inspected a number of houses in 2005, they found that less than 2% of them were fully compliant. The report was quoted in the Sunday Tribune and in Construct Ireland, but it has never been published. Why not?

God help the people who will have to live in these houses for the next 60 or 80 years - assuming they last that long of course. By having lousy standards and then not even policing them, not only have we sentenced these people to 40 year mortgages, but we are throwing in desperate fuel poverty as well.

If we can build passive houses that need no heating whatsoever, why do we build houses any other way? Fingal Co. Council has introduced a building code on its Local Area Plans that insists that houses be built 60% more energy efficient than the building code, and that they get 30% of their energy for water and space heating from renewable sources. According to Construct Ireland, this won’t result in increased house prices because they are maxed out to what people can borrow.

Dunlaoghaire Rathdown recently proposed doing the same in its County Development Plan. A submission from the Department of the Environment suggested that this might be too onerous. Eventually it was watered down to 40% and 20%. In the background, I can hear the faint clinking of glasses at a certain tent in the Galway Races.

First out of the traps this year is Christy ‘never-mind-the-Litter-Act’ O’Sullivan from FF. He didn’t chance putting all his posters up - just 15 to 20 around the outskirts of each main town - enough that if the council whipped them down on Monday it’d not put a dent in the total stock.

I reckon that the long-suffering electorate has to look at all our ugly mugs for long enough, without one of us jumping the gun to get some exclusive exposure on the lampposts of West Cork. I asked the County Council’s Senior Engineer whether they would press charges, especially since it is a member of the Co. Council that has broken the law. He said it wouldn’t be worth his while because the judge would probably let him off, it being so close to the election.

He did suggest that since it is litter, we could take them down ourselves - in the same way that one might pick up rubbish off the street, I guess we could take some of Christy’s rubbish off the lamp-posts. They cost him about €8 each by the way. Dublin Corpo takes them down with a long-reach tree clipper.

Some folks have spotted it on youtube already. I’d parked it there not realising it would get spotted so easily. Not having broadband (still!) haven’t been using youtube much….

Yes, I know its all about energy and nothing else, and I’ve seen some flak on the blogs that I’m only interested in the environment. The Green Party has tremendous social policies on issues such as health, education, pensions etc. I’m sick of saying that we should be ashamed to be one of the wealthiest economies in Europe with the lousiest health care, crowded classrooms and so forth and pensioners living on a fraction of the minimum wage.

But everyone is promising to fix all that. Lets be clear here - this is the time of a deluge of promises, and all the main parties have now promised tax cuts as well. How do they do it?? (I don’t mean fiscally - I mean with a straight face).

The Greens haven’t promised tax cuts, but much of their social agenda they can demand in a programme for government depends on the number of seats they win and how badly they are needed.

Whatever hope there is of mainstream parties fulfilling election promises (ahem! lets call them aspirations) there is no hope if we end up with an economy that is up the creek. Regardless of the environment, unless we drastically change the over-reliance of our economy on construction and oil, that is precisely where we are headed.

West Cork is particularly dependent on house building. Its what everyone here seems to do - we all build each other houses, pay for the work and materials over six months and borrow it over thirty or forty years. The money itself is a sort of vapour - a mirage. It doesn’t really exist and never did, as the banks routinely lend out umpteen times what they have in the coffers. What will we do when we’ve all finished building each other houses?

I see real opportunities for us to develop other industries, to build an alternative energy economy. But that requires a bit more imagination than we have in what passes for a cabinet at present. The demand for alternative energy technology will be brought about, not just because of oil prices, but because of the levels of CO2 emission we will be obliged to meet after the IPCC publishes its next report…

By the way, sorry I’m so slow in putting up blogs. We still haven’t got broadband here. We did get fifteen signatures for subscribers to Digital Forge and they’ve put up the mast, so here’s hoping!

Answer: “Because they want their rewards in this life, and not in the next one.”

That has to be the quote of the day from “It says in the Papers” on RTE. Afraid I don’t know which paper it was in…

What with the various tribunals, there were all sorts of ethics regulations brought in to limit the likelihood of money corrupting politics. Naturally they included a few flaws to ensure that they were entirely ineffective, such as;

1) On expenditure, the regulations don’t apply to money spent more than three weeks before the election

2) Dick Roche had the powers without consultation to raise the spending limit for a 3-seat constituency to €30,150, an increase of €4,750. That’s what you can spend in the last three weeks!

3) On income, while limiting the amount an individual or company could donate, the regs didn’t limit the amount each director of a company could make. Ten directors @ €2,500 plus another donation from the company, and you’re up to a very generous package - one that entitles you to access to the Minister should you have something on your mind.

So when farmers objected to efforts by local builders Murnane & O’Shea to run overhead powerlines through their land, the Minister for Agriculture made representations to the Council - not on behalf of the farmers of course, but on behalf of Murnane & O’Shea who were once listed in the top ten donors to Fianna Fail. (shame I can’t put a fada on the A in FAIL…).