Wind Energy Guidelines
Seanad Éireann — 2026-02-24
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Joanne Collins (SF), Agricultural Panel

I welcome the Minister to the House. I am delighted to see him here and hope he is as concerned about wind energy in this country as I am when I look at some of the statistics that I have and some of the issues in County Limerick in particular. There are at least three wind farms being proposed for County Limerick and in that context there are two issues I want to raise, relating to curtailment costs and wind energy maps.
In 2013, a circular was sent to the county councils that said not to amend or adjust their wind energy maps until new guidelines were released. The Minister knows as well as I do that we are still waiting for those new guidelines. Limerick City and County Council amended one of its maps for an area in County Limerick called Creeves. The local authority changed it from orange to green. I assume that was to suit a developer that wanted to put a wind farm there. It was not being proposed as a preferred area for wind energy. The argument is that, if the council can change it from orange to green, why can it not change it from green to orange or green to red, considering the number of objections that are submitted against each of the proposed wind farms.
The wind farms that are being proposed are themselves in breach of the 2006 regulations, where the turbines have to be seven turbine lengths apart from one another. I am not even talking about their distance from houses and schools. They are not, though. From what we can gather, they are 3.5 turbines lengths apart. When you have them that close together and there is a downwind, they become noisier. That is the reason they should be seven turbines apart from one another.
When it comes to curtailment, we have a strategy in this country to achieve 9 GW of wind energy generated onshore. I think we are at 4.5 GW or 5 GW at the moment. I do not know; I am only guessing. We curtail a certain amount of energy because our grid cannot hold it. I know the Minister will reply with all of the different reasons our grid cannot, the constraints and everything else. We know the grid is not up to standard. I want to see the grid getting up to standard - we all do - but it is like putting the cart before the horse, with us putting all of these wind turbines and wind farms in before the grid can actually take that wind energy.
The Minister knows what I will say, in that the cost of energy curtailment is put back on the consumer. The wind farm developers get paid regardless of whether that turbine is turning. They get paid their curtailment cost. For years, we have been promised that wind energy will lower our energy costs, but it is not doing that and we are paying a large amount. In 2024, there was a bill of £1 billion for curtailment in Scotland. If we keep going the way we are going by putting in more wind energy and turbines even when our grid cannot hold it and we have to keep curtailing, we could see ourselves hitting €1 billion by 2030.
I have spoken about this to experts who have worked on wind energy. They are engineers who have designed wind turbines and worked in the United States on wind energy. They are all for wind energy but not the way it is being done here and not in a way where we cannot hold this energy, whereby we end up having to curtail and put a cost back on everyone. The renewable electricity support scheme, RESS, 3 came in and relieved any of these countries from having the cost of curtailment put back on them. I have been told that the Minister could address that. I am not an expert in wind energy. When the wind turbine is turned off, the company is still being paid for wind energy regardless of whether it is producing any. If the Minister could give me a couple of answers, that would be great.

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Source: Houses of the Oireachtas. Licensed under CC BY 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/). The Official Report is revised after first publication; the fetch timestamp below identifies the version quoted.

Record URI: https://data.oireachtas.ie/akn/ie/debateRecord/seanad/2026-02-24/debate/main
Retrieved: 2026-08-14T04:54:41+00:00
Sitting date: 2026-02-24