For anyone working in the Irish wind energy industry the recent political furore over floating wind farms off the coasts of Mayo and Galway has seemed a bit detached from the real world writes Justin Moran.
Floating wind energy is a fantastic technology and I believe Ireland can – and should – be a leader in this space. We’re working with Minister Ryan’s department to urgently accelerate action here and we’re making progress but there’s a problem no one seems to be talking about.
Right now, wind farms in the west and north-west of Ireland are struggling to get the power they produce to the families and businesses that need it.
Setting aside for a moment the debate about whether floating wind turbines can yet be depoyed in the Atlantic, if you could wave a magic wand and put a 1,000 MW floating offshore wind farm off the coast of Mayo by June it would be of little benefit to anyone because we are simply not able to get the power to where it has to go.
Let me explain. This is a constraint heat map of Ireland. It shows the proportion of onshore wind power lost in 2023 in every region because the grid is too congested. The north-west, followed by the west, are the most congested parts of the Irish electricity grid.
Getting into this mess
If we’re already struggling to carry the power from existing onshore wind farms, if we’re losing a unit of power for every nine or ten we produce, how on earth can we accommodate the enormous power that would be generated by floating wind farms?
And if you’re wondering how we got into this mess, we didn’t have to.
Back in 2008 a young, up and coming, politician by the name of Eamon Ryan (whatever did happen to him) worked with the transmission system operator, EirGrid, to produce a plan to upgrade Ireland’s electricity network. It was called Grid25.
The idea was to build new lines, new connections and substations and upgrade the grid so that it would be ready for the demands we would put on it by 2025.
Think about that for a second.
Nearly 20 years ago EirGrid and the Government were planning ahead to deal with the problems we face today. That’s the kind of forward thinking we so desperately need in building infrastructure in Ireland.
Now a lot of Grid25 was delivered but three major projects did not go ahead. One of these was Grid West, which was a powerful new overhead line from Roscommon to Mayo, which was launched by EirGrid in May 2012.
Flotillas of wind farms
If delivered, at a stroke, this would have turned one of the weakest parts of the electricity grid to one of the strongest. It would have acted as a hub for future expansion and growth of the electricity network in the region which would have turned the west of Ireland into a magnet for foreign direct investment.
Forget about a single floating wind farm, we could be building flotillas of the things had Grid West been delivered and led the expansion of the network.
But it never got built because a number of people, many of them elected representatives or leaders in their communities, decided to campaign against it and to prevent the strengthening of the western grid.
They didn’t like that it was an overhead line and claimed it would ‘devastate’ the area, somehow ignoring that we’ve had two of the exact same lines stretching from Clare to the greater Dublin area since the mid-1980s and no one seems that bothered about them.
But they won and the project was set aside.
EirGrid, to be fair to them, continues to try to reinforce the grid in the region and is pushing ahead today with the North Connacht project which is a new 110 kV connection. It will help the existing congestion a little but if we’re serious – really serious – about bringing offshore electricity onto the west coast of Ireland we’re going to need to give EirGrid and ESB Networks the support and the resources they need to reinforce the grid.
Build our grid
While there may be some possibilities to use that power for non-grid purposes, like producing green ammonia or green hydrogen, the reality is – particularly at the early stage of floating wind development – we need a stronger grid in the west and in many other areas across the country.
And yet, unbelievably, we still have people in positions of political and community leadership in Ireland trying to prevent the North-South Interconnector, which is desperately needed to ease congestion on the electricity grid in the North, from being built.
The electricity grid is the central nervous system of Ireland. Nothing works, including the laptop I’m typing this on, if we don’t have a strong electricity grid which safely and securely gets clean, affordable, power from where it is generated to where it is needed.
To do that, we need grid. Eamon Ryan knew this 20 years ago. When will others catch up?
Justin Moran is Director of External Affairs for Wind Energy Ireland
