If you rely on oil, petrol or diesel be angry at our failure to wean off fossil fuels

The Sustainable Energy Authority of Ireland (SEAI) last week published its annual statistical report on Ireland’s energy system.

The good news is that for the first time, Ireland’s greenhouse gas emissions fell below 1990 levels, which is the baseline under the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change.

This is largely due to the closure of coal- and peat-fired generation, but it also points to the rising share of renewables and more efficient end uses of energy throughout the economy. The trend also shows the impact of decisive action, whether driven by climate targets or litigation.

But looking at the overall health of the Irish energy system, there are major causes for concern. Last year, Ireland imported 78.2 per cent of our total energy, and 79.1 per cent of Ireland’s energy came from fossil fuels, illustrating how dependent we are on both imports and fossil fuels.

[ When will Ireland finally achieve full fossil fuel phase-out?Opens in new window ]

Ireland faces challenges as a small island nation that is committed, on paper at least, to climate action, while relying heavily on imported energy. We have committed to phasing out fossil fuels and harnessing our potentially vast offshore wind resource to meet our needs, and eventually for exporting surplus electricity. This transition will require huge changes in how our economy is powered and how we move around and heat buildings. Within the next 10 years, electricity from indigenous wind and solar resources should be the backbone of the energy system, not oil or gas.

But deadlines keep slipping. The SEAI data shows that while the share of renewable energy is rising it is being eaten up by demand from data centres. Targets that should be guiding investment priorities are simply abandoned quietly by the Government. It is likely that there won’t be any offshore wind online before the early 2030s, and the targets for emissions reductions, biomethane, district heating and retrofitting will all be missed. The numbers of installed heat pumps and battery electric vehicles show steady increases but they are not scaling quickly enough to achieve the sectoral emissions ceilings set under the Climate Act. Instead of reaching 80 per cent renewable electricity in 2030, we are at best likely to achieve 59 per cent. And 10 months into the year we do not yet have a 2026 climate action plan to plug those gaps with new policies.

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If you are currently relying on home heating oil, gas, petrol or diesel for your domestic or business use, you should be angry about how slowly the State is acting to reduce these dependencies. Further global price shocks – and possibly even supply shocks – cannot be ruled out and the impacts of price hikes drive inflation across the economy.

Every one of these missed targets comes with compliance costs and missed opportunities that will materialise as higher prices, traffic congestion, energy poverty and health burdens. We will all pay for this negligence. And it doesn’t have to be this way.

What is missing is coherent, whole-of-Government commitment to evidence-based decision making. We don’t need to start looking at nuclear power because energy resources aren’t the problem, it’s how we are choosing to use them. We don’t even need new policies, we should start by implementing the ones we already have, backed up with resources and a decisive rejection of new fossil fuel infrastructure.

[ Ireland still relies on fossil fuel for almost 80% of energy as demand risesOpens in new window ]

There is no better example of this than the 2025 direction by the Commission for the Regulation of Utilities (CRU) for data-centre connections. Despite date centres in Ireland having the highest share of metered electricity consumption in the European Union in 2025, and possibly even the world, there is no detailed information from the Government about exactly how many data centres we have, how many have planning permissions and grid connections, and how they perform in terms of energy, water and reusing waste heat. The EU has set up a dashboard for member states to input this information, but Ireland has yet to submit any details at all.

The CRU could have, but didn’t, demand that any new data centres match their energy use in real time with renewable energy. Instead, they have been given a generous six years in which to match just 80 per cent. What this means is that the strain data centres are putting on our energy system will continue to grow. Their electricity demand is rising faster than new renewable energy can be added, so additional fossil energy will be required to balance the grid, putting the post-2030 climate and energy targets at risk also.

Meanwhile, communities across the world are increasingly objecting to new data centres on various grounds including pressure on water and energy supplies, concerns about artificial intelligence and the sheer size and visual impact of the enormous and largely human-free buildings. But there is also a sense that objecting to data centres is the only way we have right now to send a message to the tech sector – and the Government – that both need to operate in a socially and environmentally responsible manner.