Post: Private wires in Ireland: a new route to power for data centres and industry?

Private wires in Ireland: a new route to power for data centres and industry?

The Private Wires Bill will amend the Electricity Regulation Act 1999 to permit the construction of privately-owned electricity lines in specified circumstances. But what will the Bill do, and why does it matter for industrial and data centre developers?

What’s changing?

In December 2025 and in accordance with the policy decision set out in the Private Wires Policy Statement, the government has approved the General Scheme for a Private Wires Bill and the decision to commence drafting of the bill. The Private Wires General Scheme sets out the legislative amendments to the Electricity Regulation Act 1999 as amended to allow for private ownership of electricity wires in limited circumstances where public benefits to allowing such developments are clear.

Private wires must comply with the guiding principles of the policy statement and may only be allowed in four discrete circumstances:

• a direct connection between a generator, for example a wind farm or solar farm, and an electricity customer, perhaps a factory that wants to decarbonise
• a wind farm or solar farm owned by one company will be able to share a grid connection with another generator or a battery installation owned by another firm
• private lines will be allowed where they are the solution to allow on street charging of electric vehicles, and
• to allow a firm that self-supplies electricity to provide electricity to a neighbouring customer where the line does not have to cross land owned by a third party

The explanatory memorandum accompanying the Bill notes that Ireland’s current direct lines framework under section 37 of the 1999 Act has proven restrictive in practice and has stopped all development of private wire infrastructure, despite provisions under EU electricity market legislation permitting such arrangements.

Why it matters for industrial and data centre developers

For large energy users in Ireland, grid connection queues are long, reinforcement works take years, and in constrained parts of the network, new demand connections have been slow to materialise.

Private wires offer a way around part of that bottleneck. A factory or data centre could take power directly from a nearby wind or solar farm, often with storage in the mix, rather than waiting for the grid to catch up. The government frames the aim as helping industrial users and renewable generators streamline connections, access power sooner and potentially lower costs, with data centres among those likely to source electricity directly from dedicated renewable projects. Meanwhile, a site that already generates its own power could sell surplus to a neighbouring business rather than exporting it or turning it down. For industrial estates and business parks, that opens up small energy-sharing clusters that simply aren’t legal today.

There are also benefits when it comes to curtailment. Wind and solar industry groups told an Oireachtas committee that 13% and 16% of their sectors’ output respectively was lost last year to grid congestion and related challenges. Every megawatt-hour that can be routed straight to a willing buyer is one less wasted to a constrained network.

A private wire deal is usually built around a long-term contract with a named generator, so a consumer can fix a large share of its power costs for years rather than riding out wholesale volatility. In the UK, where private wires are already established, advisers point to that multi-year price certainty as the main advantage of the model, ahead of any headline saving. For energy-intensive sites planning capital investment, that predictability can matter as much as the price itself.

A private wire doesn’t remove the need to manage energy smartly. A site pairing on-site demand with a dedicated renewable supply and a battery will need to balance variable output against its own load, decide when to import from or export to the grid, and make the most of any flexibility it can offer to the system. The sites that treat that as an optimisation problem from day one, rather than an afterthought, will get the most value from the new regime. 

A physical line from a named wind or solar farm also gives a clearer, more traceable link between a site’s consumption and its renewable supply than a certificate-backed contract. That matters to companies and industries under pressure to show Scope 2 emissions reductions.