Post: Powering Ireland’s energy future

Powering Ireland’s energy future

Ireland has a long track record of transforming its power system while managing strong electricity demand growth, but strategic choices must be made on how to align its ambitions while ensuring secure electricity supply to 2035.

In a new report, published on 18 December the IEA assesses the outlook for Ireland’s energy security to 2035. It noted that electricity is set to be the backbone for achieving Ireland’s climate, energy and socio-economic ambitions, making electricity security critical to realising progress in key areas including housing, digital infrastructure, transport and heat. But it said Ireland faces strategic choices on how to align its ambitions while ensuring secure electricity supply to 2035.

Ireland is scaling infrastructure and modernising operations further to reach its goals of 80% renewable electricity by 2030 and running a system almost entirely from wind, solar, storage and imports by 2035, while managing growing electricity demand from the housing, data centre, heat and transport sectors. In 2024, Ireland supplied about one-third of its electricity from wind, four times the global average, this was managed as annual electricity demand grew by about 20% between 2015 and 2023.

But electricity demand from the residential and data centre sectors would each grow by about 7TWh to 2035. Without faster progress, the 80% renewables target for 2030 would not be met, increasing dependency on electricity imports and prolonging reliance on natural gas-fired generation, which set wholesale electricity prices 80% of the time in 2022 and currently accounts for 60% of national natural gas consumption

The report concludes that Ireland can build on its progress in power system transformation to set an example of secure integration of large shares of variable renewable generation while safeguarding energy security. The analysis sets out five pillars for policy action:

• establishing a cross-sectoral energy security strategy for the 2030s
• delivering the enabling infrastructure to accommodate the growth of electricity demand and supply including flexibility resources
• accelerating the delivery of generation capacity, storage and demand-side flexibility
• enabling secure system operation under high renewable penetration
• advancing workforce skills, strengthening partnerships and facilitating electrification.

The report called on policy-makers to ensure investment is complemented by faster permitting, proactive supply chain management, as well as incentives and connection requirements for higher demand flexibility to ensure grids, generation and flexibility resources are ready when needed.