They'd be better off with (and are building out) offshore and onshore wind. If you've ever been to the west coast of Ireland you'll know they've got almost unlimited wind energy. The country is targeting 5GW of capacity by 2030 and 37GW in the distant future[1].
If only they could harness the power of rain, Ireland would truly be an energy superpower.
[1] https://www.irishtimes.com/special-reports/2025/10/30/winds-...
> If only they could harness the power of rain, Ireland would truly be an energy superpower.
I know this is in jest, but that's basically "dam up some valley rivers and put a hydroelectric generator on the end", and unfortunately Ireland isn't so good for that. (It's not just the physical geology, it's also all the people living in the places you'd flood).
Hydro as a battery is easier and works in far more locations, but that's not harnessing the power *of rain*.
But yes, Ireland and the UK have an absolutely huge wind power resource available around them, IIRC enough to supply all of Europe if the grid connections were there to export it all.
There has been a lot of proposals to dam up massive unpopulated sea-facing valleys in Mayo and Donegal and use pumped hydro with seawater. Was a bit topic 15 years ago, but never happened. All that happened was the silvermines pump hydro plant that seems behind schedule.
Prof Igor Shvets was behind this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spirit_of_Ireland
Ireland briefly had the biggest hydroelectric dam in the world until the Hoover dam was built… but that was before electricity production really took off. Ireland doesn’t really have the geography for dams, the hills and rivers are far too small.
Are they selling to UK that AFAIU stopped building wind 10 years ago. Regulatory advantage...
You're mistaken.
Onshore wind in England was de-facto but not de-jure banned by the Tories in 2018, due to a footnote inserted in their National Planning Policy Framework. Labour removed this footnote in 2024, immediately after winning the election. [0]
Offshore wind was never affected, nor onshore wind in Scotland, Wales or Northern Ireland.
[0] https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/policy-statement-...
Thanks, I was quite mistaken indeed! I wonder how much onshore England then affected the big picture.
Well, Tories would argue that you can't get the really big turbines onshore that you can offshore, so it doesn't really matter. Tiddly little turbines don't generate that much, and why spend lots of money on the planning process and fighting NIMBYs when you can generate it offshore?
However, it does matter, when looked at in whole with the need for capacity in the National Grid. A pile of turbines across SE England would have really helped, because a lot of the offshore wind and Scottish wind power has to be dumped, and gas generators fired up instead, due to lack of grid capacity to distribute that power across the country.
We should, of course, have completed upgrades to the grid by now, but they're late.
Here's a great article about "curtailment" as it's known: https://ukerc.ac.uk/news/transmission-network-unavailability...
Not only has the UK not stopped building wind, they have over 30GW of installed wind capacity and sell electricity to Ireland for most of the year.
The 'sell electricity to Ireland' bit here is doing an awful lot of work. It's more complicated than that.
For those who don't know, Ireland operates an all-island grid, and EirGrid (the grid operator for the Republic) owns SONI (the grid operator for Northern Ireland). That means that 'UK' and 'Ireland' in this has a large Northern Ireland shaped lump of ambiguity that statement.
It shouldn't be that complicated. The UK sells electricity to Ireland (and vice-versa?) in the same way that Belgium, France, the Netherlands, Denmark and Norway sell electricity to the UK, and vice-versa.
Don't tell me EirGrid's EWIC that comes onshore at Dublin and Greenlink at County Wexford are an "NI-shaped lump". They are sources of electricity for the whole island, when it's needed, just like the UK's interconnects with the continent.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_high-voltage_transmiss...
> Are they selling to UK that AFAIU stopped building wind 10 years ago.
... Eh? No it didn't; not sure where you got that.
Ireland and the UK sell power to each other on a demand basis, though in practice Ireland is usually a net importer: https://www.smartgriddashboard.com/all/interconnection/?dura...
Uh? No they didn't stop at all?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wind_power_in_the_United_Kingd...
Tories during 2015-2023 made construction of new onshore wind farms all but impossible (removed subsidies and made planning permissions very difficult). I would assume Labor could reverse these polices but haven't seen anything in news about this.
Now you have: https://www.theguardian.com/environment/article/2024/jul/08/... (2024)
Also https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2026/jan/14/offshore...
Also https://www.theguardian.com/business/2026/feb/10/uk-onshore-...
And a lot of offshore was constructed during that period.
So still claiming that we didn't build any wind power was false.