Wind Energy Guidelines Seanad Éireann — 2026-02-24 ============================================================ Darragh O'Brien (FF), Dublin Fingal East I thank Senator Collins for her questions. I am delighted to be here in the Seanad today to answer them. I will preface my remarks by saying I will not comment on individual applications that have been submitted and I know the Senator will appreciate why. I will speak generally. As an island nation, we have some of the best wind resources in the world and we are uniquely positioned to lead Europe's renewable electricity future. In Ireland, we are the best in Europe at integrating renewables into our grid. Senator Collins mentioned the grid and I will touch on that in a moment because the grid is critical. Actually, I will touch on it now. The grid investment programme we have published, which is basically the capital plan between 2026 and 2030, will see up to €18.9 billion investment in our grid. That is nearly four times the cost of price review 5, PR5, the investment programme that concluded at the end of December and cost between €4.5 billion and €5 billion. The investment is needed. It will improve resilience. It will allow us bring more renewables into our grid. Importantly, it will ensure that we can use the energy we are generating and will reduce curtailment and, therefore, curtailment costs. Storage is a big part of that, as in how we can store renewable energy and then disperse it at the appropriate time, particularly to deal with peaks in energy demand. Only last week, coincidentally, I was in County Offaly where two major battery storage facilities opened. In PR 6, we will see not only generation in grid; a lot of it is battery and it is storage, and that is critical. A lot of our developers are now developing out those storage facilities in conjunction with the renewable energy facilities, be that wind or solar. We have about 1.3 GW of storage now and we are expanding very quickly on that. That will help on curtailment. Next week, and the Senator's question is very timely, I would expect Ireland to reach a milestone of 8 GW of renewable energy capacity in this country, which is really significant. Obviously, offshore is where we are going as well, and I expect the first offshore schemes on the east coast to be in construction by the end of the decade. The original plan was to have them electrified, although they will not be because of planning. However, some of them will be coming out of planning very soon. Ireland was the only EU state late last year that had a successful offshore wind auction off the south east coast, which was the Tonn Nua or New Wave auction. What I am really saying to the Senator is that our energy future and electrification will be very much driven by renewables. If I look at solar for argument's sake, seven or eight years ago, one tenth at 1% was all we were generating. To put it a better way, maybe ten or 15 years ago, we had 2 MW of solar, that is it. We have 2 GW now, and that does not include the 1 GW of rooftop solar we have that is not connected to the grid. The Senator rightly raised the point in relation to affordability. We still have challenges here in Ireland and across Europe with regard to energy affordability. When we look at the purchasing power index, we are kind of mid-table, but we need to do better than that. That is why people need to see the clean green sustainable energy we are creating actually make savings in their pockets. Only today, coincidentally, Wind Energy Ireland had an independent report published through Baringa, which estimated that onshore wind drove about €1.4 billion worth of savings last year, and solar about €165 million. That is actually looking at what we are deploying versus if we were to continue to import gas and fossil and use it that way. I will come back to the wind energy guidelines in a supplementary comment because I recognise the community benefits. We need to ensure there is a community benefit for people, and they need to be planned properly. I will come back in on my supplementary comment on that, however. --- 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