Ireland Still Over Reliant on Fuel Imports Despite Investment in Wind

 The Government's latest move to ban new oil and gas exploration comes at a time when Ireland has become extremely vulnerable to any supply line issues in post Brexit UK, where we import almost all of our fuel requirements from.  One would have assumed that this issue would have been taken into account in any decision to ban oil and gas exploration but this doesn't seem to be the case. The words import, dependency, UK or supply do not even appear in the Government briefing. As things stand, it is left up to commentators like me (unpaid I might add vs the civil servants and ministers who have had payrises) to draw attention to the facts and risks of the current situation. 

Here is a graph of the annual net fuel imports since 2010, when the National Renewable Energy Action Plan took effect. All data comes from the SEAI so is easily available to Government advisors.

           Source SEAI, Units are in ktoe

Its fairly clear that up until 2016, when the Corrib Gas field came into operation, we had barely reduced our fuel imports. It's also very notable that during the ten years to 2019, wind energy has made very little impact on imports. Around 3,000MW of wind energy was installed during this time. The rationale for wind has always been the reduction of fossil fuel imports. 

So the very thing that has made an impact on reducing fuel imports, gas exploration, will soon be banned, while the failure of wind energy to dent imports in any meaningful way will continue to be ignored and the policy pursued anyway. 

A recipe for disaster no doubt.