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The actual causes of electricity cost rises in Ireland being higher than Europe are: Lower population density on a grid without good connections to neighbours.

The actual causes of electricity cost rises in Ireland being higher than Europe are: Lower population density on a grid without good connections to neighbours. Previous underinvestment in network infrastructure. Gas price rises combined with Ireland having less renewables that the EU average (middle of the pack for electricity, 3rd from bottom on total energy). Maybe saving the world a bit harder would have helped keep prices down. It's certain that building more renewables now is the likeliest path to cheaper electricity. A report supporting those claims: https://www.nerinstitute.net/sites/default/files/research/8951%20NERI%20RS%2040%20Electricity.pdf https://www.nerinstitute.net/sites/default/files/research/89...

FrojoS 8mo ago
> The actual causes of electricity cost rises in Ireland being higher than Europe are Wrong comparison. Most of Europe has way too high electricity prices. It seems logical that ending the use of existing coal energy infrastructure puts upward pressure on prices. Coal is cheap, abundant, energy dense. Yes, burning coal causes lots of problems and I support ending it's use, but this is besides the point.
- vladms 8mo ago
  > Most Europe has way too high electricity prices. Way to high compared to what? Some countries do not even have a problem with prices but with capacity (Netherlands). They would be willing to pay but they do not have the grid to deliver where the thing is needed, and it's hard to build new grids in high density areas. > It seems logical that ending the use of existing coal energy infrastructure lead to an increase of prises. But doesn't this depend a lot on planning and investing in alternatives rather the just closing or not the coal? Sure, if you just close one source and leave everything else untouched prices will increase, but doesn't sound like the smartest approach overall...
  - selfmodruntime 8mo ago
    Way to high compared to actual cost. Almost half of fuel and electricity costs in Germany is tax.
    - pocksuppet 8mo ago
      If it's due to tax it can't be used to advocate the pros or cons of market arrangements, since we don't know what the market would be doing in the absence of the tax.
      - eloisant 8mo ago
        It's because of the rules of the European Energy Market where all electricity has to be as expensive as the most expensive source. So as soon as Germany lights up their gas powerplants, that follow gas prices (wars, etc), French nuclear electricity has to be sold for the same price.
        tonfa 8mo ago
        > rules of the European Energy Market where all electricity has to be as expensive as the most expensive source. aren't all/most electricity market working this way (pricing based on marginal price, aka pay-as-clear)? pay-as-bid has other potential issues and might not be better.
        dadoum 8mo ago
        Yes, but that's assuming that there should be a free electricity market. The fundamental issue with electricity markets is that they cannot rely on any signal other than the electricity price to control whether a given plant will be running at a given time or not. I think a real alternative would be to set-up an entity charged with negotiating prices with the electricity producers (which would also be a sort of partial reversal on the whole market thing in a lot of countries).
        pocksuppet 8mo ago
        Not just all electricity markets. All markets. Why would you ever sell something cheaper than you know the buyer is willing to pay?
- bryanlarsen 8mo ago
  > Coal is cheap, abundant, energy dense. Coal is neither cheap nor abundant in Ireland.
  - baron816 8mo ago
    Coal also isn’t really energy dense since so much of the energy is wasted when converting to electricity
    - marcosdumay 8mo ago
      It is still one of the densest sources. It's just not as dense as it naively seems.
    - linksnapzz 8mo ago
      Rankine cycle efficiency can be up to 45%; monocrystalline solar panels ~25%? I suppose you aren't paying for the sunshine, but if cloudy days affected coal power, James Watt wouldn't be famous.
      - ok_dad 8mo ago
        Luckily solar panels work for 30+ years while coal works for only as long as you burn it. You can also recycle solar panels, but try reversing entropy to get your coal back and you’ll see what’s up. Cloudy days are solved by wind, ocean energy, geothermal, storage, etc.
        linksnapzz 8mo ago
        "Cloudy days are solved by wind, ocean energy, geothermal, storage," Or, as Homer Simpson famously put it..."I dunno; Internet?" But seriously, there's no significant recycling of solar panels, coal extraction is a known process, and good luck running an industrial economy exclusively on renewables.
        toraway 8mo ago
- jmward01 8mo ago
  > It seems logical that ending the use of existing coal energy infrastructure puts upward pressure on prices Only if you externalize environmental costs. The point is that coal is actually really expensive. The only real argument is how fast the implicit subsidy on these externalized costs should be removed. The world has had decades to slowly remove these subsidies and failed to do so. The impacts caused by these externalized factors are starting to stack up and so should the prices.
- sollewitt 8mo ago
  If you don't count the externalities, sure. Healthcare is a cost too. We need more holistic accounting, the financialising of everything into a tidy but ultimately false P&L column is literally killing us.
- linhns 8mo ago
  > Coal is cheap, abundant, energy dense. Nuclear defeats coal in all of these aspects, aside from the high upfront cost.
  - ljf 8mo ago
    Upfront costs... then running costs (in the UK at least, it has to command a premium over other energy prices, to be profitable)... afterwards costs (in the UK no private company is on the hook for decommissioning their nuclear plants, the population will pick up that cost through taxes)... But sure, nuclear is cheap if you ignore all those things.
    - idiotsecant 8mo ago
      We're already ignoring them all for coal plants, why not?
      - ljf 8mo ago
        Which to we ignore for coal? Cost to build a new plant? Cost to run? The decommissioning costs? (Yes we ignore the externalities, and no I don't think we should burn coal. My point is Nuclear has yet to pay its way anywhere in the world, without heavy heavy govt support - far exceeding that given to renewables) Some figures on running costs: Coal costs about £62 per MWh - (£31 for the coal and £31 for the CO2 premium we already charge the energy producers). As a fossil fuel comparison, Gas costs about £114 per MWh. Nuclear - Hinkley C will cost about £128 per MWh - but likely to be even higher when it comes online. And we will be on the hook for this price as long as it runs, no matter how cheap renewables are.
        idiotsecant 8mo ago
        >Which to we ignore for coal? Cost to build a new plant? Cost to run? The decommissioning costs? (Yes we ignore the externalities, and no I don't think we should burn coal. My point is Nuclear has yet to pay its way anywhere in the world, without heavy heavy govt support - far exceeding that given to renewables) Yes, all three. Building a nuke plant without the additional concern for outcome that we put on nuke would be relatively inexpensive. It's just concrete, pumps, and a turbine. It's a ismilar level of complexity to a coal plant. Same with running cost, same with decommissioning costs. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kingston_Fossil_Plant_coal_fly_ash_slurry_spill https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kingston_Fossil_Plant_coal_fly... Suppose we designed, operated, and budgeted every coal plant to make accidents like this a statistical impossibility. Not very unlikely, that's not the standard we hold nuke to. An impossiblity. Imagine what that would cost.
- wat10000 8mo ago
  Coal is teetering on the edge of economic viability. In the US, our coal-obsessed administration is now at the point of forcing coal power plants to remain operational against the wishes of their owners who want to shut them down as they’re no longer profitable.
- cguess 8mo ago
  > Coal is cheap Only if you ignore all externalities including: - environmental damage from mining (yes this exists for renewables too) - global warming - pollution on city infrastructure - pollution on health - the sunk costs causing higher transition costs when inevitably you transfer to renewables anyways.
  - dylan604 8mo ago
    > Only if you ignore all externalities Do not discount how easy that is to do. Your list is of costs not to any bottom line of a company with bean counters. Those external costs are out side the scope of their concerns. Your list of concerns would be something for C-suite types, but the pressure of stock prices again make the external costs easy to set aside.
    - cguess 8mo ago
      Sure, but as a consumer you can also care about these things.
      - dylan604 8mo ago
        Sure, but there's only so many places to buy electricity from
  - Qwertious 8mo ago
    >Only if you ignore all externalities Not even then. Coal is dead, and gas killed it. The externalities are a distraction, coal plants are just straight-up uneconomic.
- svilen_dobrev 8mo ago
  here some comparison chart, 2nd image in the article below: https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics-explained/images/thumb/8/84/Electricity_prices_for_household_consumers%2C_first_half_2025_.png/700px-Electricity_prices_for_household_consumers%2C_first_half_2025_.png https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics-explained/images/th... https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics-explained/index.php?title=Electricity_price_statistics https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics-explained/index.php... there are 2-2.5x times differences between highest and lowest, of 25-30 countries And here is some current/future (??) prices/increases, which i have no idea where they come from: https://euenergy.live/ https://euenergy.live/
- Qwertious 8mo ago
  >Coal is cheap No it's not. I'm not talking about the environment either, coal plants are just straight-up more expensive than gas plants and renewables. Coal plants are necessarily steam turbines and not internal combustion, because coal is filthy and the mercury/sulfur/etc would wreck the guts of any machinery it goes through. Thus, it's only used to boil water. Gas turbines don't have that problem, so they spin the turbine with the combustion products directly. They're far more efficient, the machines are smaller and cheaper, and because you don't need to wait for a giant kettle to boil before ramping up the power, they're far more flexible and responsive to demand. It also helps that the gas is fed with a gas pipe, whereas coal needs to be fed with a bobcat. Which is why nobody is building new coal plants - they're way more expensive than gas plants, even if the gas fuel itself is more expensive than coal.
  - hihitsdumb 8mo ago
    Nobody is building new coal plants... ...except China, who is building coal plants at a pace never seen in history. Are they dumb, or...?
    - tpm 8mo ago
      They are replacing old dirty plants. Actual coal burned is not rising anymore.
      - hihitsdumb 8mo ago
        So they are building new coal plants.
        avianlyric 8mo ago
        Yes, many of which are expected to never actually be used. Accidental result of how China does its provence based infra funding. Right now China is building out more solar and wind per year than than the entire total deployed solar and wind in the entire UK, and they’re only getting fast. Their ability build renewables now vastly outstrips their historical coal buildout and their rising energy demands. They’re well on their way to achieving net zero far faster than anyone thought was possible.
Schlagbohrer 8mo ago
If Israel can build an electrical grid connection to Greece then Ireland should have no problem building good connections with France and the UK.
- TechnicalVault 8mo ago
  They do have 3 already and they're building 3 more: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_high-voltage_transmission_links_in_Ireland https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_high-voltage_transmiss... The new one going to France will probably have the most impact initially, the French love to sell their Nuke's surplus capacity. The new British ones by the time they're finished should have access to British's big wind energy generation, much of which will be online at that point.
weirdmantis69 8mo ago
Your link is from a disreputable source though. Their literal purpose is to gaslight people.
Gareth321 8mo ago
The argument that Ireland’s high costs are primarily due to low population density is a common oversimplification. While Ireland is rural, countries like Finland and Sweden have significantly lower population densities and more challenging geography, yet they consistently maintain lower residential and industrial electricity prices. The issue isn't where the people live. It's the gold-plating of the network. Ireland’s regulatory framework allows EirGrid and ESB Networks to pass massive capital expenditure costs directly to the consumer with guaranteed returns, leading to a build-at-any-cost mentality that density doesn't justify. The claim of "previous underinvestment" ignores the massive capital outlays of the last decade. Ireland has actually seen massive investment in its grid to accommodate renewables, but the efficiency of that spend is questionable. We have a "constraint payment" system where we pay wind farms not to produce power when the grid is congested. In 2023 alone, these payments reached hundreds of millions of euros. This isn't "underinvestment". It's an operational failure to align generation with grid capacity, a cost that is hidden in the consumer's bill. You suggest that "saving the world harder" (more renewables) would have lowered prices. This ignores the Marginal Pricing Model. In the Single Electricity Market (SEM), the price of electricity is set by the most expensive generator needed to meet demand - which is almost always a gas-fired plant. Therefore, even if wind provides 80% of the power at a given moment, consumers often still pay the "gas price" for all of it. Adding more renewables without reforming the marginal price auction system does nothing to lower the immediate cost to the consumer. It just increases the profit margins for renewable operators. I should also comment on the source of that report: Nevin Economic Research Institute (NERI). NERI is not a neutral academic body. It is the research arm of the Irish Congress of Trade Unions (ICTU). NERI’s research is fundamentally rooted in Social Democratic and Labor-centric economics. Their reports consistently advocate for increased public spending and state intervention. By focusing on "underinvestment" and "network costs," NERI shifts the blame away from the policy failures of the green transition and toward a narrative that justifies more state-led infrastructure spending. They often downplay the impact of aggressive carbon taxing and the "Public Service Obligation" (PSO) levy, which are direct policy choices that have inflated Irish bills compared to the EU average. Finally, the "poor connections to neighbors" argument is becoming obsolete. With the Greenlink and Celtic Interconnector (to France) coming online, Ireland is becoming one of the most strategically connected islands in Europe. If isolation were the primary driver, prices should be falling as these projects near completion. Instead, they remain the highest in the EU (often 40-50% above the average). The "island" excuse is a convenient shield for domestic policy inefficiencies.

FrojoS 8mo ago

> The actual causes of electricity cost rises in Ireland being higher than Europe are Wrong comparison. Most of Europe has way too high electricity prices. It seems logical that ending the use of existing coal energy infrastructure puts upward pressure on prices. Coal is cheap, abundant, energy dense. Yes, burning coal causes lots of problems and I support ending it's use, but this is besides the point.

vladms 8mo ago
> Most Europe has way too high electricity prices. Way to high compared to what? Some countries do not even have a problem with prices but with capacity (Netherlands). They would be willing to pay but they do not have the grid to deliver where the thing is needed, and it's hard to build new grids in high density areas. > It seems logical that ending the use of existing coal energy infrastructure lead to an increase of prises. But doesn't this depend a lot on planning and investing in alternatives rather the just closing or not the coal? Sure, if you just close one source and leave everything else untouched prices will increase, but doesn't sound like the smartest approach overall...
- selfmodruntime 8mo ago
  Way to high compared to actual cost. Almost half of fuel and electricity costs in Germany is tax.
  - pocksuppet 8mo ago
    If it's due to tax it can't be used to advocate the pros or cons of market arrangements, since we don't know what the market would be doing in the absence of the tax.
    - eloisant 8mo ago
      It's because of the rules of the European Energy Market where all electricity has to be as expensive as the most expensive source. So as soon as Germany lights up their gas powerplants, that follow gas prices (wars, etc), French nuclear electricity has to be sold for the same price.
      - tonfa 8mo ago
        > rules of the European Energy Market where all electricity has to be as expensive as the most expensive source. aren't all/most electricity market working this way (pricing based on marginal price, aka pay-as-clear)? pay-as-bid has other potential issues and might not be better.
        dadoum 8mo ago
        Yes, but that's assuming that there should be a free electricity market. The fundamental issue with electricity markets is that they cannot rely on any signal other than the electricity price to control whether a given plant will be running at a given time or not. I think a real alternative would be to set-up an entity charged with negotiating prices with the electricity producers (which would also be a sort of partial reversal on the whole market thing in a lot of countries).
        pocksuppet 8mo ago
        Not just all electricity markets. All markets. Why would you ever sell something cheaper than you know the buyer is willing to pay?
bryanlarsen 8mo ago
> Coal is cheap, abundant, energy dense. Coal is neither cheap nor abundant in Ireland.
- baron816 8mo ago
  Coal also isn’t really energy dense since so much of the energy is wasted when converting to electricity
  - marcosdumay 8mo ago
    It is still one of the densest sources. It's just not as dense as it naively seems.
  - linksnapzz 8mo ago
    Rankine cycle efficiency can be up to 45%; monocrystalline solar panels ~25%? I suppose you aren't paying for the sunshine, but if cloudy days affected coal power, James Watt wouldn't be famous.
    - ok_dad 8mo ago
      Luckily solar panels work for 30+ years while coal works for only as long as you burn it. You can also recycle solar panels, but try reversing entropy to get your coal back and you’ll see what’s up. Cloudy days are solved by wind, ocean energy, geothermal, storage, etc.
      - linksnapzz 8mo ago
        "Cloudy days are solved by wind, ocean energy, geothermal, storage," Or, as Homer Simpson famously put it..."I dunno; Internet?" But seriously, there's no significant recycling of solar panels, coal extraction is a known process, and good luck running an industrial economy exclusively on renewables.
        toraway 8mo ago
jmward01 8mo ago
> It seems logical that ending the use of existing coal energy infrastructure puts upward pressure on prices Only if you externalize environmental costs. The point is that coal is actually really expensive. The only real argument is how fast the implicit subsidy on these externalized costs should be removed. The world has had decades to slowly remove these subsidies and failed to do so. The impacts caused by these externalized factors are starting to stack up and so should the prices.
sollewitt 8mo ago
If you don't count the externalities, sure. Healthcare is a cost too. We need more holistic accounting, the financialising of everything into a tidy but ultimately false P&L column is literally killing us.
linhns 8mo ago
> Coal is cheap, abundant, energy dense. Nuclear defeats coal in all of these aspects, aside from the high upfront cost.
- ljf 8mo ago
  Upfront costs... then running costs (in the UK at least, it has to command a premium over other energy prices, to be profitable)... afterwards costs (in the UK no private company is on the hook for decommissioning their nuclear plants, the population will pick up that cost through taxes)... But sure, nuclear is cheap if you ignore all those things.
  - idiotsecant 8mo ago
    We're already ignoring them all for coal plants, why not?
    - ljf 8mo ago
      Which to we ignore for coal? Cost to build a new plant? Cost to run? The decommissioning costs? (Yes we ignore the externalities, and no I don't think we should burn coal. My point is Nuclear has yet to pay its way anywhere in the world, without heavy heavy govt support - far exceeding that given to renewables) Some figures on running costs: Coal costs about £62 per MWh - (£31 for the coal and £31 for the CO2 premium we already charge the energy producers). As a fossil fuel comparison, Gas costs about £114 per MWh. Nuclear - Hinkley C will cost about £128 per MWh - but likely to be even higher when it comes online. And we will be on the hook for this price as long as it runs, no matter how cheap renewables are.
      - idiotsecant 8mo ago
        >Which to we ignore for coal? Cost to build a new plant? Cost to run? The decommissioning costs? (Yes we ignore the externalities, and no I don't think we should burn coal. My point is Nuclear has yet to pay its way anywhere in the world, without heavy heavy govt support - far exceeding that given to renewables) Yes, all three. Building a nuke plant without the additional concern for outcome that we put on nuke would be relatively inexpensive. It's just concrete, pumps, and a turbine. It's a ismilar level of complexity to a coal plant. Same with running cost, same with decommissioning costs. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kingston_Fossil_Plant_coal_fly_ash_slurry_spill https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kingston_Fossil_Plant_coal_fly... Suppose we designed, operated, and budgeted every coal plant to make accidents like this a statistical impossibility. Not very unlikely, that's not the standard we hold nuke to. An impossiblity. Imagine what that would cost.
wat10000 8mo ago
Coal is teetering on the edge of economic viability. In the US, our coal-obsessed administration is now at the point of forcing coal power plants to remain operational against the wishes of their owners who want to shut them down as they’re no longer profitable.
cguess 8mo ago
> Coal is cheap Only if you ignore all externalities including: - environmental damage from mining (yes this exists for renewables too) - global warming - pollution on city infrastructure - pollution on health - the sunk costs causing higher transition costs when inevitably you transfer to renewables anyways.
- dylan604 8mo ago
  > Only if you ignore all externalities Do not discount how easy that is to do. Your list is of costs not to any bottom line of a company with bean counters. Those external costs are out side the scope of their concerns. Your list of concerns would be something for C-suite types, but the pressure of stock prices again make the external costs easy to set aside.
  - cguess 8mo ago
    Sure, but as a consumer you can also care about these things.
    - dylan604 8mo ago
      Sure, but there's only so many places to buy electricity from
- Qwertious 8mo ago
  >Only if you ignore all externalities Not even then. Coal is dead, and gas killed it. The externalities are a distraction, coal plants are just straight-up uneconomic.
svilen_dobrev 8mo ago
here some comparison chart, 2nd image in the article below: https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics-explained/images/thumb/8/84/Electricity_prices_for_household_consumers%2C_first_half_2025_.png/700px-Electricity_prices_for_household_consumers%2C_first_half_2025_.png https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics-explained/images/th... https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics-explained/index.php?title=Electricity_price_statistics https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics-explained/index.php... there are 2-2.5x times differences between highest and lowest, of 25-30 countries And here is some current/future (??) prices/increases, which i have no idea where they come from: https://euenergy.live/ https://euenergy.live/
Qwertious 8mo ago
>Coal is cheap No it's not. I'm not talking about the environment either, coal plants are just straight-up more expensive than gas plants and renewables. Coal plants are necessarily steam turbines and not internal combustion, because coal is filthy and the mercury/sulfur/etc would wreck the guts of any machinery it goes through. Thus, it's only used to boil water. Gas turbines don't have that problem, so they spin the turbine with the combustion products directly. They're far more efficient, the machines are smaller and cheaper, and because you don't need to wait for a giant kettle to boil before ramping up the power, they're far more flexible and responsive to demand. It also helps that the gas is fed with a gas pipe, whereas coal needs to be fed with a bobcat. Which is why nobody is building new coal plants - they're way more expensive than gas plants, even if the gas fuel itself is more expensive than coal.
- hihitsdumb 8mo ago
  Nobody is building new coal plants... ...except China, who is building coal plants at a pace never seen in history. Are they dumb, or...?
  - tpm 8mo ago
    They are replacing old dirty plants. Actual coal burned is not rising anymore.
    - hihitsdumb 8mo ago
      So they are building new coal plants.
      - avianlyric 8mo ago
        Yes, many of which are expected to never actually be used. Accidental result of how China does its provence based infra funding. Right now China is building out more solar and wind per year than than the entire total deployed solar and wind in the entire UK, and they’re only getting fast. Their ability build renewables now vastly outstrips their historical coal buildout and their rising energy demands. They’re well on their way to achieving net zero far faster than anyone thought was possible.

Schlagbohrer 8mo ago

If Israel can build an electrical grid connection to Greece then Ireland should have no problem building good connections with France and the UK.

TechnicalVault 8mo ago
They do have 3 already and they're building 3 more: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_high-voltage_transmission_links_in_Ireland https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_high-voltage_transmiss... The new one going to France will probably have the most impact initially, the French love to sell their Nuke's surplus capacity. The new British ones by the time they're finished should have access to British's big wind energy generation, much of which will be online at that point.

weirdmantis69 8mo ago

Your link is from a disreputable source though. Their literal purpose is to gaslight people.

Gareth321 8mo ago

The argument that Ireland’s high costs are primarily due to low population density is a common oversimplification. While Ireland is rural, countries like Finland and Sweden have significantly lower population densities and more challenging geography, yet they consistently maintain lower residential and industrial electricity prices. The issue isn't where the people live. It's the gold-plating of the network. Ireland’s regulatory framework allows EirGrid and ESB Networks to pass massive capital expenditure costs directly to the consumer with guaranteed returns, leading to a build-at-any-cost mentality that density doesn't justify. The claim of "previous underinvestment" ignores the massive capital outlays of the last decade. Ireland has actually seen massive investment in its grid to accommodate renewables, but the efficiency of that spend is questionable. We have a "constraint payment" system where we pay wind farms not to produce power when the grid is congested. In 2023 alone, these payments reached hundreds of millions of euros. This isn't "underinvestment". It's an operational failure to align generation with grid capacity, a cost that is hidden in the consumer's bill. You suggest that "saving the world harder" (more renewables) would have lowered prices. This ignores the Marginal Pricing Model. In the Single Electricity Market (SEM), the price of electricity is set by the most expensive generator needed to meet demand - which is almost always a gas-fired plant. Therefore, even if wind provides 80% of the power at a given moment, consumers often still pay the "gas price" for all of it. Adding more renewables without reforming the marginal price auction system does nothing to lower the immediate cost to the consumer. It just increases the profit margins for renewable operators. I should also comment on the source of that report: Nevin Economic Research Institute (NERI). NERI is not a neutral academic body. It is the research arm of the Irish Congress of Trade Unions (ICTU). NERI’s research is fundamentally rooted in Social Democratic and Labor-centric economics. Their reports consistently advocate for increased public spending and state intervention. By focusing on "underinvestment" and "network costs," NERI shifts the blame away from the policy failures of the green transition and toward a narrative that justifies more state-led infrastructure spending. They often downplay the impact of aggressive carbon taxing and the "Public Service Obligation" (PSO) levy, which are direct policy choices that have inflated Irish bills compared to the EU average. Finally, the "poor connections to neighbors" argument is becoming obsolete. With the Greenlink and Celtic Interconnector (to France) coming online, Ireland is becoming one of the most strategically connected islands in Europe. If isolation were the primary driver, prices should be falling as these projects near completion. Instead, they remain the highest in the EU (often 40-50% above the average). The "island" excuse is a convenient shield for domestic policy inefficiencies.