Ireland · Energy · Built environment

Wind Energy in Ireland: A Third of Our Power, and the Grid That Can’t Carry It

In August 2022 we published a short, optimistic piece about Ireland leading by example on wind. Four years on, most of the optimism was justified — and the one thing nobody was talking about has turned into the central problem.

Updated August 2026 · Originally published 27 August 2022

Irish wind, 2025

33%Share of the island’s electricity supplied by wind farms

5,000MWInstalled onshore capacity in the Republic, passed in 2025

13%Of available wind energy dispatched down — generated, then turned away

The 2022 article made a simple case. Ireland has extraordinary wind, Ireland is using it, and the direction of travel is good. All three were true. They are still true. Irish wind farms delivered around 13,634 gigawatt-hours in 2025, roughly a third of the island’s electricity, with Kerry the top-producing county ahead of Cork and Galway. The Republic passed 5,000 MW of installed onshore capacity. In December, wind alone supplied 39 per cent of the country’s power.

What the 2022 piece did not mention once — not a word — was the electricity grid. That omission is now the story.

In the first half of 2026, EirGrid brought 86.8 per cent of the wind energy generated in Ireland onto the system. The other 13.2 per cent was dispatched down: produced, available, and refused, because the wires could not carry it or the system could not absorb it. Wind Energy Ireland put the island-wide figure at 15 per cent and translated it into something more legible — enough electricity to supply about 667,000 homes, or roughly every household in Dublin, Westmeath and Wicklow combined.

This is not a story about whether wind works in Ireland. That question was settled some time ago. It is a story about what happens when generation outruns everything built to receive it.

The 2022 promises, audited

Every claim below appeared in the original August 2022 article. Status reflects the position as of August 2026.

2022 — “A floating offshore wind farm of 1,400MW will be developed off the coast of western counties Clare and Kerry” by ESB and joint venture partners, Equinor.

Stalled

Equinor had already left. The Norwegian company withdrew from Irish offshore wind in November 2021, nine months before the article was published, citing its assessment of the regulatory and planning regime among its reasons. No floating wind farm off Clare or Kerry has since been consented, and floating technology remains outside Ireland’s Phase 1 and Phase 2 offshore rounds.

2022 — A “€50 million Sustainable System Support facility will be developed, making it the largest of its kind in the world.”

Built

Delivered. The synchronous compensator at Moneypoint — Ireland’s first — was completed as phase one of the redevelopment and has been in operation since 2023. It supplies the inertia and voltage support that thermal plant used to provide, which is precisely what allows more wind onto the system.

2022 — Moneypoint would be transformed from “a primarily coal-burning plant into a renewable energy hub.”

Half done

Coal generation ended at Moneypoint on 20 June 2025, six months ahead of schedule, after 40 years. But the station is not a renewable energy hub yet. Under a 2023 agreement with EirGrid, it now runs on heavy fuel oil as an out-of-market generator of last resort until 2029, with two 50,000-tonne oil tanks installed for the purpose.

2022 — Ireland is “on track to power 3.75 million homes using wind energy by 2030.”

Recast

Arguably already achieved, and no longer the right measure. Residential customers accounted for 28 per cent of metered electricity consumption in 2025. Wind supplied around a third of all generation. Homes stopped being the binding constraint some time ago; the growth is elsewhere.

2022 — Ireland is “one of the leading countries in its use of wind energy, sitting in second place worldwide after Denmark.”

Revised

Denmark still leads the world comfortably. Ireland remains in the global top ten by wind share of generation, but Ember’s ranking now places several other European countries in close company, with Finland having doubled its share since 2020. Second place worldwide is no longer a claim that stands without qualification.

2022 — Pat Keating of Shannon Foynes Port: up to €100 billion may be needed for floating wind, “with €12 billion in supply chain investment required to locate in the harbour.”

Stalled

The port bottleneck Keating warned about has not been resolved. Research from DCU’s NexSys programme found in 2025 that Ireland has no marshalling port fully equipped for large-scale offshore wind and only 44 hectares of planned laydown space nationally, against a requirement for four dedicated ports and €2–3 billion of investment.

2022 — The electricity grid was not mentioned in the article. Not once.

The gap

In 2022, 8.5 per cent of the island’s available wind energy was dispatched down. By 2024 it was 14 per cent. In the first half of 2026, EirGrid dispatched down 13.2 per cent of available wind in Ireland. The constraint moved from generation to transmission, and the 2022 framing had no vocabulary for it.

The third that never arrives

Dispatch-down, 2022–2026

“Dispatch-down” is EirGrid’s umbrella term for renewable output that is available but not used. It splits into two things. Constraint is local: a wind farm in Kerry is generating at full output, the lines carrying that power east are already full, and the turbines are turned down regardless of what the rest of the system is doing. Curtailment is system-wide: a minimum number of large conventional generators must stay online across the island to hold frequency and voltage, so even on a night when wind could theoretically supply everything, it is not permitted to.

The second cause is the more uncomfortable one. Eight large synchronous units must run across the island — five in the Republic, three in Northern Ireland — and in 2024 EirGrid attributed the overwhelming majority of curtailment in the Republic to that requirement alone. Ireland is not throwing wind away because the wind is unreliable. It is throwing wind away because the machines that keep the system stable still burn fuel.

Share of available wind energy dispatched down

Island of Ireland · bars scaled to 20%

2022

8.5%

2023

10.7%

2024

14.0%

2025

13%

H1 2026

15%

2022–2024 from EirGrid and SONI’s Annual Renewable Energy Constraint and Curtailment Reports, all-island basis. 2025 and H1 2026 from Wind Energy Ireland, all-island basis. EirGrid’s own figure for the Republic alone in H1 2026 was 13.2 per cent; figures on a Republic-only basis run lower than all-island ones, because dispatch-down in Northern Ireland is consistently higher.

Ireland is not throwing wind away because the wind is unreliable. It is throwing it away because the machines that keep the system stable still burn fuel.

The waste has a price attached, and it runs in both directions. Wind Energy Ireland’s 2025 report found that on the days with the most wind, the average wholesale cost of a megawatt-hour was €76.41; on days when the system leaned almost entirely on fossil fuels it was €148.55. Every megawatt-hour dispatched down is a megawatt-hour of the cheap number replaced by the expensive one.

There are answers, and some of them have started arriving. Grid-scale batteries reached roughly 800 MW of operational capacity, were fully integrated into the real-time electricity market from November 2025, and the first four-hour system in the country came online in early 2026 — with a connection pipeline well over 10 GW behind it. The Greenlink interconnector between Wexford and Pembroke entered commercial operation in 2025, adding 500 MW of two-way capacity. EirGrid’s operational roadmap targets raising the system non-synchronous penetration limit from 75 per cent towards 95 per cent by 2030. In July 2025 the Government approved €3.5 billion in equity for ESB Networks and EirGrid specifically to accelerate network build-out.

The Celtic Interconnector, a 700 MW link to Brittany and Ireland’s first direct connection to the continental European grid, is under construction. It was originally targeted for 2026. Current published dates run from 2027 to late 2028, depending on the source.

Offshore: a pipeline, not yet a project

Phase 1, Phase 2 and the ports problem

Ireland’s only operational offshore wind farm remains Arklow Bank Phase 1, commissioned as a demonstrator more than twenty years ago, rated at around 25 MW, and now approaching decommissioning. Everything else is pipeline.

That pipeline is real and substantial. The first offshore auction, ORESS 1, awarded roughly 3.1 GW across four Phase 1 projects. Codling Wind Park, a 1,300 MW joint venture between Fred. Olsen Seawind and EDF Renewables on Codling Bank off Wicklow, submitted its planning application in September 2024 and would export through three subsea cables to a new 220 kV substation at Poolbeg in Dublin Bay. Dublin Array, developed by RWE and Saorgus Energy, filed in February 2025. Statkraft’s 500 MW North Irish Sea Array is progressing. Sceirde Rocks off Connemara was cancelled by its developer.

Phase 2 began with the country’s first Designated Maritime Area Plan, covering the south coast, and the Tonn Nua site 12 kilometres off Waterford — a 900 MW project awarded through the ORESS 2 auction in late 2025 to an ESB and Ørsted joint venture. EirGrid is developing two offshore substation platforms in the Tonn Nua area under its Powering Up Offshore — South Coast programme, with landing points in the Cork and Waterford–Wexford regions.

The constraint nobody can permit away

44 hectares

Ireland’s total planned laydown space for offshore wind marshalling, across all ports. Analysis by Dr James Carton and Bill Duggan at DCU found that at that capacity Ireland could install roughly 0.5 GW of offshore wind per year — which would push the 5 GW target from 2030 to around 2038.

Only Cork Ringaskiddy and Rosslare Europort are engaged in early planning for marshalling. Shannon Foynes, with the deepwater the Atlantic floating sector needs, is too distant from the Irish Sea sites where Phase 1 is concentrated. The National Development Plan has committed over €5 billion to grid and transmission. It has committed nothing to marshalling ports.

There is a further unresolved dispute. A Government working group established in 2022 to manage the overlap between offshore wind and the fishing industry has been in mediation under Kieran Mulvey, the former head of the Labour Relations Commission. As of May 2026 those talks remained unresolved, with the offshore sector seeking a compensation formula for survey and construction disruption and fishing representatives pressing for negotiation on longer-term impacts.

Onshore: consented, eventually

Planning throughput, 2025–2026

The Climate Action Plan requires 9 GW of onshore wind by 2030. The Republic has just over 5 GW, with about 450 MW in construction and roughly 2,500 MW holding planning permission. Getting from here to there depends almost entirely on how quickly An Coimisiún Pleanála can decide.

The picture is genuinely mixed, and worth stating carefully because it is easy to get wrong in either direction.

On approval rates, the system has improved sharply. Fifteen onshore projects totalling 626 MW were approved in 2025, at an 88 per cent grant rate against 45 per cent in 2024. Since January 2025 the Commission has approved 48 wind and solar farms, including 16 that local authorities had refused, and rejected only four applications in eighteen months. The Supreme Court’s Coolglass ruling on how planning bodies must weigh obligations under the Climate Act has, by the Commission’s own account, materially shaped its decision-making.

On throughput, the picture is worse. No new wind farms at all were approved in the first quarter of 2026, against seven projects and 402 MW in the same quarter of 2025. Nine projects totalling 592 MW have waited over a year for a decision; another six, 406 MW, have been in the system more than two years. Three approvals followed in April. RED III now imposes statutory deadlines of 52 weeks for onshore renewable decisions and 65 for offshore, and the Commission has said it is working towards them — while also noting that inadequate engagement with information gaps invites judicial review and the risk of decisions being set aside.

That is the real bind. The same rigour that makes a permission survive the High Court is what makes it slow to issue.

Who is the electricity actually for?

Homes, data centres and the demand curve

The 2022 article measured everything in homes. It was the standard framing at the time, and it has quietly stopped describing what is happening.

In 2025, data centres in Ireland consumed 7,663 GWh of electricity, up 10 per cent on the previous year. That is 23 per cent of all metered electricity consumption, against 5 per cent a decade earlier. Consumption by every other user — households, shops, offices, factories — rose by 2 per cent over the same period. Residential consumption, urban and rural combined, was 28 per cent. Large energy users as a category accounted for 33 per cent.

Metered electricity consumption	2015	2025	Direction
Data centres	5%	23%	7,663 GWh, up 10% year on year
All residential	—	28%	Rural share fell from 12% to 9%
Large energy users (incl. data centres)	—	33%	10,812 GWh, up 9% year on year
Total metered consumption	Up 34% across the decade		EirGrid projects +45% demand, 2023–2034

Source: CSO, Data Centres Metered Electricity Consumption 2025, published 7 July 2026. Demand projection from EirGrid.

In December 2025 the effective moratorium on new data centre grid connections in place since 2021 was lifted. The Commission for Regulation of Utilities set conditions: new facilities with a maximum import capacity at or above 1 MVA must source at least 80 per cent of annual demand from additional renewable generation in the Republic within six years of energisation, and must provide generation or storage matching their requested peak import, participating in the wholesale market.

It is a serious attempt to make new demand pay for its own supply. Whether it works depends on whether that additional generation can actually be built and connected — which returns to planning, ports and wires.

Recommended podcast · S4, E27

Building Climate-Ready Streets, Homes & Transit with Feljin Jose

The Dublin City Councillor and public transport advocate on the demand side of the transition — how streets, housing and transit decisions determine what the electricity system is eventually asked to do.

The built environment is the other half of this

Heat, fabric and the electrification of demand

For anyone working in construction, retrofit or design in Ireland, the wind story only makes sense alongside the buildings story. Clean generation and electrified demand are two halves of one system, and Ireland has been considerably better at the first than the second.

The Climate Action Plan targets 400,000 heat pumps in existing homes and 500,000 homes upgraded to a B2 rating by 2030. SEAI supported 53,984 property upgrades in 2024, of which 21,817 reached B2 or better. Heat pump installations in existing homes that year numbered 3,600, bringing the 2019–2024 total to 14,194.

The ESRI ran the arithmetic in March 2026 and found that heat pump installations stood at 3.5 per cent of the 2030 target, on a trajectory to reach around 51,400 by 2030 — just under 13 per cent of what was promised. Reaching 500,000 B2 upgrades would require roughly 75,000 homes a year from 2026, around three times the 2024 rate.

The ESRI report contained a second finding that deserves more attention in the sector than it has had: measured energy use varies remarkably little between dwellings of different BER ratings. Occupants of upgraded homes take a substantial part of the benefit as warmth rather than as reduced consumption. That is not a failure — comfort was always part of the point, and the health case for it is strong — but it does mean the carbon savings modelled from a retrofit programme and the savings delivered are not the same number.

Recommended podcast · S4, E22

Ireland’s Retrofit Race — with Dr. Ciarán Byrne, SEAI

The SEAI director on making Irish homes warmer, cheaper to run and lower-carbon at national scale — and on where the programme is running into limits of cost, skills and homeowner appetite.

Grant levels have moved substantially in response, with SEAI heat pump supports rising to as much as €12,500 by early 2026 and new window and door grants introduced in March. Whether money was the binding constraint is a live question. Speaking at the SEAI Energy Show in April 2026, Ciarán Byrne pointed to a different obstacle: the cost and intrusiveness of the fabric works required to make an older house heat-pump-ready, and the electricity price against which a homeowner runs the sums.

The regulatory pressure is arriving regardless. The recast Energy Performance of Buildings Directive sets out zero-emission building requirements and national renovation trajectories that will reshape the Irish stock over the next decade, and it does not depend on grant uptake to take effect.

Recommended podcast · S4, E16

The Energy Performance of Buildings Directive: A Game-Changer for European Building Sustainability, with Stephen Barrett of the IGBC

What the recast EPBD actually requires, how it lands in the Irish context, and why the directive matters more to the retrofit market than any single grant announcement.

The EPA’s May 2026 projections named commercial and public buildings among the sectors furthest from their 2030 sectoral emissions ceilings. The route from where Ireland is to where it has committed to be runs, to a substantial degree, through construction.

What the money does locally

Community benefit funds

One thing that has developed since 2022, and is rarely covered, is the transfer of money from wind farms to the places they sit in. Every project supported under the Renewable Electricity Support Scheme must establish a Community Benefit Fund contributing a minimum of €2 per megawatt-hour generated, for the fifteen-year contract period. For onshore wind there is an additional direct payment of €1,000 a year to each household within a kilometre of the project.

In 2024, Irish wind farms delivered over €6.65 million through community benefit funds, the highest level recorded. The fifth RESS auction, held in late 2025, cleared at a strike price of €98 per megawatt-hour and carried up to €45 million in community benefit contributions over the life of the scheme. SEAI maintains a national register of the funds and what they have supported.

For practices working on community buildings, sports facilities, schools and heritage projects in rural Ireland, this is a funding stream worth knowing about by name. It is small relative to the capital cost of the turbines. It is not small relative to the budget of a parish hall.

What 2030 actually looks like

Targets, projections and the gap between them

The Climate Action Plan target is 80 per cent of electricity from renewable sources by 2030, underpinned by 9 GW of onshore wind, 5 GW of offshore wind and 8 GW of solar.

The EPA does not model that outcome. Its greenhouse gas projections published in May 2026 put renewable electricity at 52 to 59 per cent of supply by 2030, and attribute the shortfall in part to delays in delivering planned projects, offshore wind foremost among them. Nationally, the EPA projects emissions falling by up to 25 per cent against the 51 per cent required in law, and as little as 13 per cent if current policies are not built upon. Ireland is expected to come close to meeting its first carbon budget and to exceed the second by a wide margin.

It would be a mistake to read that as a verdict on wind. Wind is the part of the Irish system that has worked. Coal ended at Moneypoint largely because wind made it possible to end it. Wholesale prices fall measurably on windy days. Wind and solar together saved Irish consumers over €1.5 billion in gas and carbon costs in 2025, of which wind accounted for roughly €1.4 billion. Across the EU, wind and solar generated more electricity than all fossil sources combined for the first time in 2025, and Ireland was part of the reason the coal line kept falling.

The generation problem was solved. The connection problem, the storage problem, the port problem and the demand problem were not.

The 2022 article ended on the observation that Ireland has the ambition and the question is whether it has the funding. Four years on that reads as very nearly right, and slightly misaddressed. The money is arriving — €3.5 billion for the networks, €5 billion-plus in the National Development Plan for grid and transmission, several gigawatts contracted through RESS and ORESS auctions. What has not arrived at the same pace is the physical and institutional capacity to spend it: marshalling ports, transmission lines, planning determinations, storage, and a retrofit workforce large enough to electrify the demand side.

Ireland can generate a third of its electricity from wind. It has proved that. The next phase is a construction problem, and it belongs as much to this industry as to the energy sector.

Ireland on Constructive Voices

Our Ireland coverage tracks the built environment, energy and biodiversity across the island — reporting, data journalism and podcast interviews.

CategoryIreland — all Irish built environment coverage
CategoryIreland Podcasts — interviews with Irish practitioners and policymakers
ReportWhere Does Ireland Actually Rank in Europe for Green Buildings and Passive Houses?
ReportIreland Biodiversity and the Built Environment
DataHow Many BREEAM Buildings Are There in Ireland?
ReportSustainable Building in Cork, Ireland: An Updated Report

Principal sources

Wind Energy Ireland, annual wind energy report 2025 and H1 2026 dispatch-down analysis
EirGrid and SONI, Annual Renewable Energy Constraint and Curtailment Reports, 2022–2024
Central Statistics Office, Data Centres Metered Electricity Consumption 2025, 7 July 2026
Environmental Protection Agency, Greenhouse Gas Emissions Projections 2025–2055, 27 May 2026
SEAI, National Retrofit Plan Full Year Report 2024; ESRI residential decarbonisation analysis, March 2026
Carton, J. G. and Duggan, B., Missing the Boat: Port Infrastructure as a Critical Barrier to Offshore Wind Energy Development in Ireland, NexSys / DCU
ESB, Moneypoint Power Station; Ember, European Electricity Review 2026

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Wind Energy in Ireland: A Third of Our Power, and the Grid That Can’t Carry It

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