Analysis: Here are 5 suggestions on how to increase the resilience of our energy infrastructure for homes, businesses and public services - Dr Fionn Rogan is a Senior Research Fellow at MaREI, the Research Ireland Centre for Energy, Climate and Marine at the Environmental Research Institute (ERI) at UCC. Prof Brian Ó Gallachóir is Director of the MaREI Research Centre , Director of the Environmental Research Institute, Professor of Energy Engineering and Associate Vice President of Sustainability at UCC. Dr Barry Hayes is a Senior Lecturer (Associate Professor) in Power Systems Engineering and a funded investigator in the MaREI Research Centre at UCC. Dr Paul Deane is Senior Lecturer in Clean Energy Futures at the MaREI Research Centre at the Environmental Research Institute (ERI) at UCC. Prof Hannah Daly is Professor of Sustainable Energy and a Funded Investigator at the MaREI Research Centre at the Environmental Research Institute (ERI) at UCC.

It is over two weeks since Storm Éowyn hit Ireland. The impacts on infrastructure such as electricity networks, communication towers, water treatment plants has been devastating. Hundreds of thousands of people had basic services cut off and, indeed, many continue to suffer.

Although these types of storms are anticipated to be rare, they are a wake-up call. We know from climate science that we are experiencing more extreme weather events and that this will continue. The fall-out from the storm has highlighted the vulnerabilities of a distributed population.

But within Ireland's dispersed population, there are many norms of self-reliance that demonstrate the capacity for resilience. For example, most one-off houses have managed their own water supply for decades through private wells and septic tanks. Here are 5 suggestions on how to improve the resilience of the energy system, particularly for homes but also for businesses and public services.

Improve resilience through self-generation and onsite back-up

Just like reducing our national imports of fossil fuels reduces our exposure to energy supply shocks so too does on-site self-generation of electricity. About 120,000 homes currently have solar panels generating electricity. During non-storm times, this facilitates partial self-generation and more economical consumption of grid electricity, especially if accompanied by batteries. During storms and power cuts (and importantly, if a home isolator switch is installed), homes can fully self-generate electricity.

Batteries are just one example of how onsite generation can also provide back-up electricity to increase resilience. But policy supports for battery storage systems were cut in 2022 and reintroducing these supports should be considered. For heating, an older technology is the Superser, a portable gas heater that can run on bioLPG (and which must be coupled with a carbon monoxide alarm). Home stoves provided back-up heat to many, though it is important for the fuel supply to be dry sustainable wood.

Support community hubs and demo sites for existing and new solutions

In many of the worst impacted areas, the community response was incredibly positive, with small community hubs emerging and providing toilet facilities, teas and coffees, device charging and/or hot showers. Although undoubtedly helpful, many hubs were small and couldn't always provide the services people needed.

There is potential to harness this societal capacity by increasing the scale and enhancing the resilience of these hubs by enabling them to demonstrate many of the new energy technologies such as electric cars, solar panels and battery storage. Studies of the diffusion of innovations show that an innovation is more likely to be adopted if it can be easily observed.

Improved communication about existing solutions

Before Storm Éowyn, it was not widely known that an electric car battery could be a source of power for households. Only about 4% of cars in Ireland are currently full battery electric, but stories of people using their EV to charge their toaster have emerged. In many cases all that was needed was a simple adaptor to connect the EV charging cable with a device known as Vehicle-to-Load (V2L).

It is also possible for some EVs to charge a home (V2H) or sell electricity back to the grid (V2G) though additional approved home electrical work (such as a home isolator switch) and a compatible EV are required. As more and more people buy electric cars these arrangements could become more widespread. But more proactive communications and facilitation of these solutions by state entities is essential to help the public be fully informed and prepared in advance.

Better energy-efficient homes

Renovating existing homes to be as energy efficient as possible (ie deep retrofitting) is vital to limit vulnerability during power cuts in cold weather. Policy supports could be expanded (including a targeted approach in areas more vulnerable to storm related power cuts) to help surmount the institutional, financial, information and inertial barriers that many people encounter with home energy retrofitting.

Irish building regulations now require that all new homes be Nearly Zero Energy Buildings (NZEBs). Invariably, this means all electric, which could make it vulnerable during a power cut, but because the building fabric is so energy efficient there is very little heat loss even during a cold spell (one home anecdotally only dropped by half a degree during a three-day power cut). For many such buildings, heating the kettle is enough to warm a room (which could be powered by an EV or a solar power and battery system) .

More investment in the electricity network

Ireland has a settlement pattern of many one-off rural houses which is one reason (amongst others) that our electricity distribution network is four times the EU per-capita average. 85% of this network (157,000 km) is overhead lines which are exposed to the weather. While undergrounding more of the distribution network would make it more resilient, the costs of large-scale undergrounding are prohibitive due to the sheer length of the overhead line network. These costs would ultimately be shouldered by consumers that already pay the highest consumer electricity prices in Europe.

Ireland’s electricity distribution network is also old, with many components in service since the 1970s or earlier. We need significant investment to upgrade this infrastructure and provide additional grid capacity for the energy transition, allowing our distribution network to accommodate more EVs, heat pumps, and solar PV generation.

We can improve the resilience of our existing overhead network by replacing older wooden electricity poles with more state-of-the-art structures. Creating forestry corridors to avoid trees falling on power lines (a major issue in Storm Éowyn) will also help, as will increasing our stock of spare parts for the electricity network.