Archiwum dla miesiąca: October 2024

Britain’s new Secretary of State for Energy Security and Net Zero, Ed Miliband, was only 72 hours into his new job when he lifted the British ban on onshore wind farms. A week later, he announced a new taskforce, bringing together industry and Government, to accelerate onshore wind delivery. By the start ofAugust, it was already at work.
It is frustratingto see that level offocus in Britain while, in Ireland, the development of onshore wind energy meets barrier after barrier. Unlike Britain, we are already a leader in onshore wind energy. Our country’s wind farms provide a greater annual share of our electricity demand than any other in Europe, but the pace of delivery of new projects is slowing down.
Our country’s windfarms provide a greater annual share of our electricity demand than any other in Europe.
A report published by Wind Energy Ireland in July shows that we are only getting around a quarter ofthe projects we need to match our energy targets through An Bord Pleanála. Many ofthe projects recently approved by the Board have already been challenged in the courts.
Fewer projects mean higher energy prices for Irish families and millions more spent to import expensive fossil fuels. We need to build onshore wind farms, offshore, new solar farms and battery projects and reinforce the electricity grid in just a few years. Our planningsystem is simply not fit for purpose to achieve this.
The Government has established a taskforce to accelerate the delivery ofonshore renewable energy, and it must prioritise fixing the planning system.
We have seen other countries do this by applying new EU regulations like the RED III Directive with Germany, for example,now granting planning permission to 1,000
megawatts of onshore wind every month. In Ireland, instead ofthis acceleration, County Councils are zoning land to preventthe development of wind energy, including incidents where the local authority changed the zoning of land to prevent a wind farm from being built after it was announced or had applied for planning.
There is a conflict between national and EU energy policy (to provide the affordable, clean, secure energy Irish people want) and County Development Plans, which, in some places, have been designed to block the development of new wind farms. Resolving this conflict needs to be as much a priority for the Irish Government as speeding up the development ofonshore wind farms is for Minister Ed Miliband.

source: Justin Moran, Director of External Affairs, Wind Energy Ireland