5 ways to improve Ireland's energy system after Storm Éowyn

11 Feb 2025

In the time since Storm Éowyn made land-fall in Ireland, the impact on infrastructure such as electricity networks, communication towers, water treatment plants has been devastating. Hundreds of thousands of people had basic services cut off. 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, for decades most one-off houses have managed their own water supply through private wells and septic tanks. Here's five suggestions on how to improve the resilience of the energy system, particularly for homes but also for businesses and public services. 

1. 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. 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.  

2. Support community hubs and demonstration 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 a variety of toilet facilities, tea & 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 EVs, solar panels and battery storage. Studies of the diffusion of innovations show that when an innovation can be easily observed, it is more likely to be adopted.  

3. Improved communication and facilitation of 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 been picked up. In many cases all that was needed was a simple adaptor to connect the EV charging cable with a device. This set-up is known as Vehicle-to-Load (V2L).  

It is also possible for some EV 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. 

4. Expand deep retrofitting of existing homes and accelerate construction of new energy efficient homes to reduce vulnerability during power cuts in cold weather 

Renovating existing homes to be as energy efficient as possible (i.e. 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 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) . 

5. Invest in the electricity network to increase its resilience  

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. 

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Published on RTE Brainstorm on 10 February 2025