I am growing increasingly concerned about our apparent lack of strategy from our current Government when it comes to reconciling our current climate commitments – which would see us slash emissions by 51 percent by 2030 (which we’re nowhere near achieving) – with reality.
I am concerned about this because it’s something of a damned if you do, damned if you don’t situation, and the only way we’ll be less damned is if we make pains to head off the situation now.
But we don’t appear to be making any effort to do so. At least not publicly.
This is on my mind because of a report that went, it seems to me, curiously uncommented upon in recent weeks, given its potential ramifications. Valerie Hanley over at Extra.ie reported that “more than 50,000 households and businesses are being hit with power outages every week,” a number that appears to be on the rise:
“Last year alone, more than 30,000 blackouts affected almost three million customers, which includes people temporarily left without electricity on multiple occasions, across the country, an increase on the 2.2 million recorded in 2023.”
Sure, a couple of politicians commented on it – Fianna Fáil MEP Barry Cowen and Aontú leader Peadar Tóibín – but by and large, for the size of the phenomenon we’re talking about here, it slipped by leaving the status quo relatively untroubled.
A couple of days before that was published, over 20,000 homes and businesses were left without power in Dublin as a result of a power outage that affected a number of places around the country. Dublin was simply the worst of them.
More anecdotally, as my colleague Ben Scallan and I recorded our weekly podcast earlier this week, he dropped out of the call suddenly, but not before I saw the lights go out in his room and the camera switch off. He, too, had suffered a power cut, just days after another one of our colleagues had the power to her apartment block cut off as well.
We experienced power cuts in rapid succession earlier this year, between Storm Darragh in December and Storm Éowyn in January, the latter needing no further explanation after it plunged almost 800,000 people into prolonged darkness and disconnection.
On a separate infrastructural note, there was also a cold snap in January that resulted in significant disruption to water supplies for thousands of people. You might respond that that’s just the way it goes in sufficiently cold weather – water freezes and pipes burst. But it’s apparently the way it goes in hot weather too.
Uisce Éireann was branded “utterly unfit for purpose” by Cork North-Central TD Ken O’Flynn earlier this month after the announcement of the earliest-ever hosepipe bans across several parts of the country. This was followed by reports that seventeen other areas across the country were being monitored for water shortages amid “wall-to-wall sunshine and drought fears”.
That the loss of power and other services is becoming a growing fixture of Irish life apparently can’t be denied, on either the basis of the figures obtained by Extra.ie or experience. Memory is a notoriously fickle thing, but I’ll go out on a limb anyway and say that I do not remember this being the case throughout my childhood and adolescence, nor do any of the people older than I that I’ve asked about it.
The common reason given for these disruptions is that climate change is resulting in more severe weather patterns, which has a knock-on effect on our national infrastructure. More powerful storms affect our grid and drier spells affect our water supplies. That meteorological factors weigh in on this cannot be denied.
Much was made as well of the state of our electricity infrastructure, especially in the wake of Storm Éowyn. An ageing, extensive and therefore vulnerable network fell easy prey to powerful winds and falling trees, which meant that an electrifying rural society was left in the lurch when heating and transportation systems operating on that basis were suddenly cut off and rendered useless.
Decarbonising in Ireland has meant out with the old reliables – turf, coal, gas and oil heating – and diesel generators, and in with the new but vulnerable.
However, this has been much discussed. What hasn’t been so discussed is the precarious green transition the country is undergoing which, even if you agree with it in principle, is woefully underconsidered and underplanned. The Irish Academy of Engineering released a report last month that said the country’s commitment to achieving climate neutrality by 2050 fails to acknowledge technological and financial realities and amounts to “wishful thinking”.
The report also touches on the fact that since 2014 annual national risk assessments have repeatedly identified the vulnerability of Ireland’s supply of natural gas.
“The exposure to a natural gas supply risk is particularly concerning because of the inescapable and continuing reliance the country has on natural gas as the energy source of last resort for electricity generation,” the IAE says.
“The fundamental challenge arising from the intermittency of renewables has not been adequately addressed to date and energy policy needs to recognise that there is no currently available or prospective alternative to natural gas as the backstop source of energy for electricity generation,” it adds.
And yet we plough on ahead, making a commitment to a zero-emissions electricity system by 2050 “without first understanding and demonstrating how it is feasible,” in the IAE’s words.
So we’re caught between a rock and a hard place. The Irish Fiscal Advisory Council and the Climate Change Advisory Council stated in March that if Ireland misses its 2030 target of a 51 percent reduction in emissions, it could incur fines of between €8 and €26 billion. Potentially bye-bye Apple Windfall and then some. But if we somehow strive for this effectively, we risk jeopardising our ability to generate electricity reliably. Perhaps that’s what we’re already doing, if the data we began this article with and experience is anything to go by.
I am of the opinion that we should seriously reconsider our commitment to these targets, and quickly, because lawfare and smaller sanctions are infinitely preferable to either the punitive fines we’d face for failing to meet them, or far worse, the vagaries of an unreliable national grid, as Portugal and Spain got a sense of recently.
Watching this week as the London Metro was engulfed in chaos by a power outage, it struck me that energy insecurity may really end up being, as far as Europe is concerned, the story of the 2020s. Unless we change course, which we have a once in a generation opportunity to do. Unfortunately, as I began with, I don’t see any urgency about seizing that chance.