Electricity Prices have gone Bonkers !

Bonkers.ie rightly point out that Ireland has one of the highest electricity prices in the EU :

 But they fail to point out that this was not always so, an assumption one would make from their second tweet. If Ireland was always an island, then surely we always have had high electricity prices ? (Yes, I also hear you say but surely we don't have to import as much fuel now with all the windmills we've built - unfortunately bonkers.ie does not address this point either)

It's just a fact of life, they say, everything is expensive here in Rip Off Ireland ! 

Well the truth is that during the 1990s and early 2000s, Ireland had comparatively cheap electricity, even cheaper than the UK as economist Colm McCarthy has often pointed out.  Irish Economy.ie wrote this back in 2009 :

What puzzles me, however, is that Irish electricity costs were not always particularly high relative to our trading partners. In fact, a chart (figure 3) in the Department of Enterprise, Trade and Employment paper shows that electricity prices for industrial users in Ireland were well below those paid in the EU-15 for most of the 1990s, and were still no higher on average than in the rest of the EU-15 in 2002-2004. Yet in 2008 Ireland was the second most expensive country for industrial users in the EU-15. According to IBEC, Irish companies have seen industrial electricity prices rise by 70% since 2000.

We can see that Richard Tol and Colm McCarthy have been proved correct in the comments underneath the article :

Richard Tol

The fuel costs of wind are indeed zero. The capital costs are not. Without subsidies, wind barely competes — even in Ireland where the climate is favourable and other electricity is dear. Wind also has negative externalities for other power generators, first and foremost in its demand for reserves but perhaps also in higher cycling costs. 

colm mccarthysays:

As for wind penetration targets, there is only one question worth asking – is the Government’s very high target justifiable as a component in the least-cost abatement strategy?

The main things that have changed between the 1990s and the 2000s/2010s is the construction of 4,000MW of wind farms and supporting network infrastructure, funded both directly and indirectly in electricity bills, carbon trading and the growth of energy hungry data centres.  We are now paying the price for all of these ideological policies which have been implemented without any cost benefit analysis. There was also the change to the euro. 

It certainly has nothing to do with the importing of fossil fuels, most of which has been very cheap throughout much of the 2010s.