On Monday the Sustainable Energy Authority of Ireland (SEAI) published a 2020 update of its Renewable Energy in Ireland report. It states boldly that
'Ireland is not on track to meet any
of its 2020 renewable energy targets.'
The graphic below illustrates just how far off we are.
Reading the press release prompted me to dig out my old UCC masters dissertation from 2007, a study of wind energy’s contribution towards meeting Ireland’s 2010 and 2020 target’s for renewable electricity (RES-E).
While it’s true what they say, prediction is difficult, especially about the future, it’s remarkable the progress that has been made considering the cataclysmic disaster that was the financial crash of 2008 and its aftermath. We always knew that Transport and Heat were going to be tough nuts to crack, so the focus has been predominantly on decarbonising electricity. And prior to the Greens entering government in 2007, the target was 33.3% – so in that scenario, we hit the target. But the past is a foreign country.
The industry was well aware of the fact that we would miss our RES targets, so the announcement comes as no surprise. And the high-profile launch last summer of the government’s Climate Action Plan was in part motivated by the need to get ahead of the inevitable criticism as news rolled around about missing critical targets and the fines that would have to be paid because of it. Thanks in part to activists like Greta Thunberg, but also because of the weather-related disasters pointing clearly towards earlier-than-expected effects of the climate crisis, the zeitgeist was already pushing solving climate change back up the political agenda after a too-long hiatus.
The development of sustainable energy policy in Ireland
The current phase of the process of mapping out future renewable energy strategy began formally
with the launch in December 2003 of the consultation document Options for Future Renewable Energy Policy, Targets and Programmes. The document set out a range of indicative sustainable energy source penetration targets for the electricity market: 13-20% for the year 2010 and 15-30% for the year 2020…
Around the same time, the Commission for Energy Regulation (CER) made a decision to place a moratorium on further wind energy connections to the grid, above the 600 MW or so already agreed, because of concerns raised by the ESB National Grid about the ability of the grid to accommodate such connections.
SEAI: Renewable Energy Development 2006 – An overview of policy and strategy evolution (April 2006)
Rereading my dissertation 13 years later allows me to see more clearly how my analysis could have been deeper and more robust. It was an attempt to explore in a ‘rational’ way how likely Ireland was to meet it’s RES-E targets for 2010 and 2020, focusing exclusivley on wind, which was expected to make up the lions portion.
The rationale ran thus:
- the ESRI’s economic growth forecast was used to project electricity demand in 2020 (38 TWh),
– 2018 actual demand was 31 TWh; - back then the 2020 target for RES-E was one third (12.7 TWh),
– it’s now 40% (12.4 TWh using the 2018 figure above); - wind energy would contribute the lions share of this target (60% to 80%);
– 2018 actual was 85% (8.7 TWh, 9.5TWh in 2019) - assuming a capacity factor (CF) between 25% and 35%, the required installed wind generation for the central scenario (70% from wind at a 30% CF) was 3,400 MW.
– January 2019 actual was 4,127 MW (CF: 29%)
In summary, the 2007 forecast calculated wind would need to generate 8.9 TWh in 2020. Using 2018/2019 actuals as proxies for 2020 targets, wind generated 9.5 TWh in 2019 (and could have generated 10.3 TWh but for ‘Dispatch Down‘ due to constraints and curtailments on the system). The 40% target of our 31 TWh demand in 2018 is 12.4 TWh, so wind contributed 77% to that target.
The big delta between the forecast then and reality today is the 20% drop in actual demad versus forecast, about as objective a measure you’ll find of the legacy of the 2008 financial crisis. According to my 2007 frame of mind, which I’ll suggest would have been a reasonable reflection of the electricity industry more broadly, the wind industry delivered.
That we’ve still missed our targets is ostensibly because the non-wind contribution didn’t show up, and back in 2007 biomass and ocean (ocean?) energy were expected to make a meaningful contribution. Understanding better the deeper technicalities and politics is a necessary exercise, but for another day (been there, done that). I will state the obvious, developing critical national infrastructure takes a long time and requires constant investment well in advance. And covid has demonstrtad starkly how bad we are at it generally, even if Ireland has done considerably better than its nearest neighbour, a challenge undoubtedly excacerbated by the austerity that followed the banking crisis.
I have considered what we might do about our future targets. The new median forecast to 2030 is over 40TWh – it will be very interesting given covid to re-read this blog then and compare actual with forecast. The RES-E target is 70%, and the 2040 target is effectively 100% renewable (net zero-carbon, we can debate CCS another time, 2040’s ocean energy?).
If you’ve managed to read this far, thanks for staying with me (that preamble is far too long). And so on to the real motivation for writing this post, which is relevant to Ireland today – literally today…
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