MaREI/ERI’s Professor Hannah Daly from the Energy and Policy Modelling Group at University College Cork looks at Ireland’s energy trends since 1990. 

The Sustainable Energy Authority of Ireland recently published the final energy balance for 2023, which is essentially a spreadsheet that summarises what energy sources are produced and consumed by different sectors, going back to 1990. Each year Hannah updates her own tracker with the SEAI’s new energy balance and finds the trends fascinating. Here are some interesting insights from this year’s balance, with a broader view of energy trends over the past 24 years.

The SEAI’s own analysis is available on this webpage, along with the energy balances themselves, and their deeper “Energy in Ireland” report is published annually, which contains a lot more information. The analysis below is just reporting the main trends that jump out at Hannah.

Highlights

• Ireland generated more energy from wind than from natural gas in 2023, for the first time.
• But since 2016, all the growth in wind energy production has matched the growth in data centre electricity demand. We are running up an down-moving escalator!
• Ambient heat (the renewable energy that heat pumps are based on) is now a larger source of energy for homes than coal, for the first time. But peat is still a greater source of heat, and oil dominates.
• We may have reached peak oil for road transport, but the consumption of jet kerosene for international aviation – which overtook petrol consumption in 2017 – is at an all-time high and shows no sign of slowing.
• Despite strong population and economic growth, total primary energy demand has stabilised.

Visit Hannah’s website to read her full insights.