Ireland has been in the news lately for all the wrong reasons, starring in a soap opera of EU intrigue and enforced bank bailouts.

In Dublin recently for the first time in years, I heard some good news in the midst of all the gloom. The country has a head start on most of the world in capitalizing on one of its few plentiful resources: renewable energy.

Renewable energy could be Ireland’s new pot of gold. According to a recent book by John Travers, 100,000 jobs could be created from harnessing renewable energy and applying energy efficiency, and 20 percent of Ireland’s future GDP could come from exporting its renewable energy. The wind and wave power available on Ireland’s Atlantic coast is one of the biggest renewable resources in the world and can be supplemented by biomass. To put this in context, the nation’s peak electricity demand is approximately 6,000 megawatts (MW) while the wind blowing over the island contains 8,000 megawatts of power. Ireland already has 1260 MW of installed wind capacity. The country also aims to put 500 MWs of wave power online by 2020.

As a result Enterprise Ireland’s cleantech unit is concentrating its resources of a limited set of niches, among them energy efficiency and renewables. According to Marina Donohoe, who heads up the unit, these areas were chosen because of Ireland’s strengths in IT and construction (that property bubble was useful for something) in addition to the large supply of renewable energy.

Ireland’s power grid is rather unique in that it’s an island grid with very limited interconnection to the rest of Europe. Mainline Europe’s grid, for example, is very closely connected, which means that an individual country’s grid can effectively “trade itself out of trouble” using supplies from neighboring countries. Ireland’s grid operates largely independently. It also has an unusually high penetration of wind power. On one day in April this year 42% of the Irish grid was powered by wind. This is the highest worldwide wind penetration on a power grid to date. The average is closer to 15 percent of power supplied by renewables, but the Irish government has a target to increase this to 40 percent by 2020 (37 percent from wind power). As a result, Irish grid operators are already tackling problems caused by the integration of high levels of renewables that will hit other grids later.

Another innovation is the wind dispatch tool that controls 60-70 percent of the country’s wind farms in real-time. Wind turbines can be ramped up or down within 10 seconds. Quite often farms need to be ramped down when more wind power is being fed into the grid than is manageable. A new connector will also be in place by 2012 that will allow 500 megawatts of power to be exported from the country. Exporting renewable power can help with grid stabilization since it helps to achieve a better balance between conventional generation and renewables.

The problem with unlocking Ireland’s renewables “pot of gold” is that it requires major upfront capital investment, and cash is exactly what the Irish government doesn’t have right now. In spite of this, the 4-year austerity plan introduced as part of the recent bailout does include investing €4.5 billion in the electricity grid to develop renewable resources. So who knows? Maybe green can mean gold for Ireland.

reuters.com