Renewable energy, a sure route to ensuring the lights stay on

Irish Examiner

2 days ago

'Just imagine for a second that there was no climate emergency,' says Justin Moran. 'The globe isn't warming, everything is fine, there is no threat to life. You would still be insane not to be accelerating the development renewable sources of energy. It is the cheapest form of new electricity. The price drops in solar over the last couple of years have been incredible. Even if there was no climate emergency, you'd be doing this anyway and doing it as fast as you can.'
Moran, a self-confessed 'energy nerd' is Director of External Affairs at Wind Energy Ireland (WEI), the body that represents Ireland's wind industry, with over 200 affiliated members. Their goal is neither simple nor trivial. Individually and collectively, they are on a mission to transform windy weather and odd day of Irish sunshine into the million blessings that a supply of electricity brings to civic society.
Passionate in his advocacy of the urgency of renewable energy and the replacement of fossil fuels in the power chain, Moran sounds slightly bewildered that there are still people among us yet to grasp the importance of this transformation. He sits his argument on a stool with three legs — climate mitigation, energy security and the inarguable cost benefits of change.
'Onshore wind is the most affordable source of new energy — it helps consumers in that it drives down the price of electricity,' says Moran. 'Since 2020 onshore wind has saved over €1.7 billion in consumer bills. We spend about one-million euro every hour importing fossil fuels into Ireland for energy and there is absolutely no reason why we should be doing that. What we should be doing is putting in an energy system that ensures that money stays at home and that we have energy security and energy independence.'
Ireland is doing quite well when it comes to producing electricity from onshore wind sources. Over a third of our energy demand is satisfied by this source, a higher proportion than any other country in Europe, which would come as a surprise to anyone who has walked across a Donegal beach on a blustery day.
'We've the best wind conditions anywhere in Europe,' explains Moran. In parts of the West of Ireland, the onshore winds are as good as offshore. Government has focused on the support schemes, the policies, the frameworks that have allowed us to build this capacity.
Passengers wait before boarding their train at Sants railway station in Barcelona in April, a day after a massive power cut affecting the entire Iberian peninsula and the south of France.
But there is an uncomfortable structural wrinkle lurking in the data. Ireland went all in on onshore wind farms in the early days of the 'rush to renewable' while other countries adopted more blended energy strategies, diversifying into solar, nuclear and offshore to supplement and balance their onshore output.
Ireland cannot meet its net-zero targets in the coming decades through a disproportionate reliance on onshore wind farms and accelerating delivery from disparate sources is critical to meeting Ireland's international obligations. Justin Moran says that his members at WEI stand ready, willing and able to rise to the challenge.
'Our plan is to produce nine-thousand megawatts of onshore wind energy by 2030 and we are currently at about five, either built or in build,' he continues. 'We believe that there is enough land in Ireland suitable for onshore wind that could get us to about fifteen megawatts. One of the things we are asking of government is to set us a target of 11k megawatts by 2035 and fifteen by 2040. We are asking that we be given us those targets, and they will enhance our possibilities.'
Moran acknowledges that there are real and valid social and community barriers in the way of these goals and that targets aren't met just by writing them on a piece of paper. A harmonious coalition of suppliers, government, local administration and the citizenry has yet to fully form on the pace and nature of the solution. In view of this, if his fairy Godmother made him supreme leader for a day and granted him one public policy credit, where would he spend it?
He mulls the question long and silently, and then greedily chooses two options.
'Planning and Grid. We need to work with the regions and the county councils to identify land for wind energy. We estimate about 1.8% of the land in Ireland is available for wind farm development. Each county council tends to have its own approach for zoning, but if we could get to the point where we had national approach on how to identify land and understand how much power you could generate from it the planning system would be transformed.
"A lot of the cost is in how long the project has to stay in the planning system. We need to develop winds farms more affordably. This is the government's direction of travel, but it needs to happen, much, much faster.'
The criticality of a robust infrastructure to harness and distribute electricity is to the front of his mind and at the top of his concerns. Electrical power is like an unsold airplane seat — once the plane takes off the asset perishes, and it can never be sold again. It is the same with electricity that cannot find a route to the grid.
At times in Ireland, up to 14% of electricity can be wasted because the grid is not strong enough to process the power and onshore wind is instructed to shut down temporarily. It's a frustration that Moran wears heavily.
'We know that we can provide far more electricity than we will ever need in this country,' he maintains. 'The resource is astonishing; it boggles the mind, but one of the questions is what do we do with that surplus wind? First thing we could do is export it, one of the challenges is that we are a small, isolated island of an electricity grid, in mainland Europe, there is always somewhere for your power to go.
"Another challenge is that Ireland is an expensive place to build a wind or solar farm which means that the prices in Britain or France are cheaper than us. So not only do you need an enormous amount of the resource, but you also need to be able to sell more cheaply than your competitors.'
Moran is speaking less than a month after Spain and Portugal had gone dark for almost a day with an as yet clearly unexplained catastrophic grid failure. Sixty million people in first-world modern economies without power and the sum of all fears for 'energy-nerds' had come to pass.
We Irish often run ourselves down, but where we have got to now with onshore is something we can be proud of. But if we want to fully get to that clean energy future, we need to get the projects through planning and we need a stronger grid. There is no sense in building a wind farm in Donegal or a solar farm in Spain if it cannot get the power to your house.
The new renewable systems will have hundreds of generators, and they are not going to be located necessarily beside the bigger cities. You need a system to move that electricity, and this only works if you have a strong grid. Onshore wind farms reduce more carbon emissions than every other energy technology combined in this country, but decarbonisation is only the number two issue. The number one issue is that when you press your light switch something happens. The lights cannot go out.