In the 1920s, the young Irish Free State made a radical choice.
It took roughly 20 per cent of the national budget and spent it on the Ardnacrusha hydroelectric scheme in Co Clare.
It was 100 years ago this month when the process towards realisation began with the Shannon Electricity Act coming before the Dáil.
“It was a huge sum of money [£5.2 million] when Ireland had nothing,” economist Prof John FitzGerald of Trinity College Dublin says. “To invest that was massive. We haven’t seen anything like that in infrastructure investment since.”
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At the time it was one of the largest infrastructure projects in the world, taking four years to complete. The ESB, the first Irish semistate company, was set up in 1927 to manage the project and it electrified the nation.
Built by the German company Siemens-Schuckert, Ardnacrusha was responsible for 80 per cent of the State’s electricity for years.
Ardnacrusha “was transformative, not just because it lit light bulbs”, says Michael Bernard, a leading US-based futurist on climate and energy, “but because it showed what determined public investment could do. That same proportion of public spending today – about €24 billion over five years – could be deployed again, but what would be as transformative?”
The possibilities are real, the technologies proven and the costs increasingly manageable, he says.
So what could €24 billion deliver in clean energy? What if Ireland spent the same money on a huge chunk of decarbonisation technology as it did a century ago on a big hydroelectric dam? Bernard did number crunching on the clean energy possibilities for Ireland:
In transportation, €24 billion buys “a full fleet transformation”. At €30,000 per electric vehicle, fully subsidised, the country could replace 800,000 petrol and diesel cars outright. With partial subsidies, 1.5 million could be converted.
“That would electrify nearly the entire personal transport sector,” he says.
Shifting focus to solar, rooftop systems offer a different kind of return. “Ireland isn’t southern Spain, but solar still works – particularly on homes and businesses using the power directly. At current costs, about €1,500 to €2,000 per kilowatt, €24 billion could fund solar arrays for nearly every viable roof in the country.”
Grid-scale battery storage is increasingly seen as the glue that holds renewable-heavy systems together, Bernard says. Using four-hour lithium-ion systems, €24 billion could buy roughly 20 gigawatts (GW) of power capacity and 80 gigawatt-hours of storage.
“That’s enough to meet peak national demand and to shift up to 29 terawatt-hours of electricity per year from ‘surplus’ to ‘shortage hours’. If those batteries are charged with renewables, they can prevent curtailment (cutting renewable power when there is more supply than demand in the grid) and reduce need for fossil-fuelled ‘peaking plants’ burning natural gas.”
That level of spending on heat pumps would transform residential heating. With an average installation cost of around €12,000, it could fund two million retrofits, covering nearly all Irish homes heated with oil or gas.
Alternatively, it could provide district heating systems for 1.3 to 1.5 million homes in urban areas with low-carbon heat from waste energy, geothermal or centralised heat pumps.
For onshore wind alone, €24 billion buys around 18GW of capacity, nearly four times what Ireland has installed at present. That would generate around 49 terawatt-hours of clean electricity every year. Given Ireland’s total annual electricity demand today is around 31 terawatt-hours, “this one investment could allow Ireland to electrify transport and heating while exporting surplus power.”
Offshore wind – deploying fixed-bottom or floating turbines – is equally compelling, generating vast output of renewables with the latter opening up “vast resource areas farther from shore”. This would support deeper electrification and enable export of surplus power, potentially via new interconnectors to Britain and continental Europe, Bernard says.
Pumped hydro storage – such as the ESB’s Turlough Hill power station in Co Wicklow – offers similar grid services, but with far longer durations and operational lives. Ireland’s terrain, especially coastal valleys of the northwest, lends itself well to this technology, he says. The country could build five to six large pumped hydro stations – “enough to provide backup for multiple days of low wind or high demand”.
But none of it works without the grid, he says. If there were only one option, this is the one he would pursue.
“Today’s electricity system was never designed for three times the load, let alone millions of devices pulling power and feeding it back. A foundational upgrade to Ireland’s transmission and distribution infrastructure would cost somewhere between €12 and €15 billion.”
It would avoid hundreds of millions of tonnes of emissions by enabling electrification in heating, transport and industry.
Is this too good to be true? FitzGerald says envisioning a clean energy future is merited, but realising it goes beyond spending money. His preferences are: spending it on interconnectors so we can export renewables; forcing mass electrification of cars (subsiding sales rather a scrappage scheme for petrol/diesel vehicles); retrofitting houses, starting with homes owned by local authorities; and installing windmills.
Focusing on enablers will assist transformation, he says, such as “abolishing the [current] planning system” and enhancing ability to store renewables when volumes can be 10 or 20 times more than demand. At present, he says, “there’s only so much renewables you can absorb into the system”.
Crunch issues such agriculture are about changing behaviours and adjusting incentives rather than money, he says. The best return would be from planting up to 10,000 hectares (24,700 acres) of forestry every year up to 2050, taking about 100 million tonnes of carbon out of the atmosphere.
The reality is that having a budget of that scale today, “you couldn’t spend it immediately, other than buying machines”, FitzGerald adds. This is because of energy infrastructure delivery problems and worker shortages.
While there would the luxury of lots of money; there is a case for “sticking it in the bank and spending it slowly”.
University College Cork energy analyst Paul Deane agrees, saying: “Many would argue we have lots of money already. I don’t think you could spend it, even if you were reckless.”
He believes Ardnacrusha was “just as much about a vision for Ireland and possibilities for the future that we never had before”.
Critically, it should be appreciated that to decarbonise Ireland and move away from fossil fuels only requires spending an additional 1 per cent of national income – confirmed in analysis by FitzGerald and Niall McInerney of the Central Bank – which “belies the excuse that it’s not doable”.
Ireland Inc spends 10 per cent of its budget on “energy stuff”: buses, petrol/diesel, heating and so on. “By increasing that to 11 per cent, we would be able to move away from fossil fuels in coming decades,” Deane says.
All told, Deane says, “the problem is not money. It’s that we don’t have an abundance of actions” to move away from fossil fuels.
The Shannon Taskforce produced a report in 2023 which listed an abundance of actions that could transform Shannon estuary into Ireland’s “Atlantic green digital corridor” and a hub for infinite offshore wind off the west coast.
Harnessing the spirit of 1925, it was launched with a large ministerial presence at Ardnacrusha led by Leo Varadkar, then taoiseach, and Eamon Ryan, who was minister for climate and energy. It got a ringing endorsement, but slow progress since has led to much local frustration.
It all comes down to investment in infrastructure, says taskforce chairman Barry O’Sullivan, with Ireland only spending 51 per cent of the EU average under this heading.
Specifically, our grid and transport systems are unsuited for a population of 5.5 million people.
There is a broader picture, however, which must also be embedded in future national strategy, he says. These are three global macrotends of living longer; decarbonisation and digitisation (including artificial intelligence) – and having enough green energy to power AI and data centres and so on.
“We need to have skin in this game to be successful,” O’Sullivan says.
On priority big spends, he suggests harnessing offshore wind energy with a view to sending half of it to Europe while building a fit-for-purpose national electricity grid to fit within a wider European one.
The opportunity is staggering, Bernard says. “In raw emissions terms, nearly every option outlined here results in lifetime savings in the range of 70 to 500 million tonnes of carbon dioxide. Most cost less per tonne than carbon taxes. Some pay for themselves in energy savings.
“All create jobs. And critically, the grid investment – boring though it may seem – is the keystone. Without it, electrification stutters. With it, Ireland can unlock everything else.”
This is not a theoretical exercise, Bernard says. “This is the scale and scope of action we need to take climate goals seriously. It’s what following through on Ardnacrusha’s legacy would look like in the 21st century.
“One dam lit the nation; €24 billion can now enable powering, heating and moving it – cleanly, permanently, and affordably. That’s not just good economics. That’s the foundation of a liveable future.”
