41% of our electricity last month came from Irish wind farms — January Wind Energy Report

Irish wind farms had a strong start to the year with a new record for the most electricity ever produced in the month of January. The January Wind Energy Report showed that 41 per cent of the country’s power came from wind last month, up 9 per cent on January 2022, but the industry warned delays in the planning system were slowing the delivery of new wind farms.

Wind farms produced 1,479 gigawatt-hours of electricity last month, up 200 GWh on the previous January best, and the seventh best month on record for wind power. This is equivalent to the annual electricity consumption of around 320,000 Irish families.

Noel Cunniffe, CEO of Wind Energy Ireland, said: “This is a very strong start to the year and builds on a strong final quarter of 2022 when wind energy was Ireland’s number one source of electricity.

“We need to accelerate the delivery of new wind farms and to do this we need the Government to invest in our planning system. Projects are spending more than a year waiting for decisions on applications for planning permission.

“We have no hope of reaching our 2030 targets without a functioning planning system and to do that we urgently need to see massive investment in An Bord Pleanála, the National Parks & Wildlife Service and key environmental NGOs to ensure applications can be quickly assessed and decided on.

“The pipeline of projects is there, the investment is there, but everything is slowed down by an under-resourced planning system that is completely unfit for purpose.”

Sharp fall in price

The average wholesale price of electricity in January was €162.16, down more than a hundred euro from December’s average of €276.52, but still far higher than before the fossil fuel energy crisis. Prices fell even further on days with the most wind power when the average cost of a megawatt-hour of electricity was €133.69, rising to €196.41 on days where we had to rely on fossil fuels.

Noel Cunniffe, CEO of Wind Energy Ireland, said: “Irish wind farms protect consumers every day by pushing expensive gas generators off the system and reducing our dependency on imported fossil fuels.

“But our families, communities and businesses will remain vulnerable to extreme electricity prices while we are forced to depend on imported fossil fuels.

“The quicker we can build wind farms and reinforce the electricity grid, the more we can do to help consumers.”

The results of this report are based on EirGrid’s SCADA data compiled by MullanGrid and on market data provided by ElectroRoute. This series will play an important role in informing the development of wind energy in Ireland.

ENDS

Note: A megawatt-hour (MWh) is a unit of electricity. A normal Irish household will use approximately 4.6 megawatt-hours of electricity in a single year. A 3 MW turbine producing electricity at maximum capacity for an hour will produce 3 megawatt-hours. A gigawatt-hour (GWh) is 1,000 MWh.