Sarah Carey: Storm Éowyn exposed urgent need for change to power supply, but solar grants do more harm than good

All things considered, our household got through Storm Éowyn quite well. We’re accustomed to power cuts in my evil one-off house in Meath, so I store five-litre bottles of drinking water and have a rain-water barrel for washing and other such needs. We’ve a gas hob and I keep a battery-powered radio, oil lamps and power banks for mobile phones always prepped.

Then there’s our cosy fire. We winced wondering how people in new houses with no chimneys were coping. When you put all your eggs in the electrification basket, a power outage is a real problem.



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