The smart management of wind turbines is a significant opportunity for innovation, with a global market

POLICY OPINION: I first windsurfed in 1979. It took me some time to learn not to fight the wind, struggling to hold my balance and not be whipped forward by the mast into the water. Instead, the secret is to use the sail as a wing, unlike a yacht or a dingy, so generating lift and skimming the waves, using the wind as delicately as a seagull, writes CHRIS HORN

By 2020, our Government expects that 40 per cent of our national electricity generation will come from natural energy sources such as wind, wave, tidal, geothermal and solar. Energy capture from wave and tidal is promising in the Irish context, but the challenging environment requires prolonged testing before most investors will agree the technology is proven. Solar is also promising, but perhaps not in the Irish context. Geothermal remains interesting, but is as yet relatively unexplored in Ireland. Wind energy capture, both on- and offshore, stands for the time being as the foundation for our power generation from natural sources. Government targets show that by 2020, 38 per cent of national electricity production should come from wind, and just 2 per cent from other renewables.

It is striking to note, therefore, that it also expects that the vast bulk of the remaining 60 per cent of electricity generation will come from natural gas, of which today almost all is imported from the UK. The Corrib gas field could at its peak substantially reduce our dependence on imported gas. The bitter dispute at Rossport thus has a national significance that perhaps some of us have yet to realise. However, it is more startling to observe that our national planning currently omits any sufficiently scalable third option that could underwrite our dependance on the wind and the continued availability of gas at a reasonable price.

The considerable challenge of wind energy is its temporal nature. The smart management of collections of wind turbines is a significant opportunity for innovation, with a global market. While management of individual wind turbines is already provided by their manufacturers, the operational management and workflow processes involved in managing large grids of wind (and solar and tidal and wave and geo-thermal) devices from multiple manufacturers remains a major international challenge. The robustness offered by operations support systems in, for example, the telecommunications industry, is therefore a very interesting commercial opportunity for innovation.

If wind energy provides less than 5 per cent of our national energy consumption, additional capacity from traditional generation - such as natural gas turbines - can reasonably underwrite windless days. But if our use of wind energy is to expand to almost 40 per cent of our national generating capacity by 2020, then considerable standby generation will be needed; yet on windy days, such equipment will be idle and the capital investment involved unproductive. What's the alternative?

The Government expects that by 2020 at least 10 per cent of the national car fleet - 250,000 vehicles - will be hybrid, or fully electric. Like the operations support of grids of wind and renewable devices, there is also a considerable global opportunity for operations support for national networks of electric car recharging stations. Recharging stations must be operationally maintained, should be quickly locatable when free, should generate alerts (eg by text message) when charging is completed or interrupted, should optimise power consumption and could be responsive to realtime fluctuations in the cost of electric power.

Electric cars may offer a strategic opportunity, beyond the reduction of emissions. Dependence on wind energy for a substantial proportion of our national electricity capacity is a concern, unless surplus generated energy can be stored for use during windless periods.

If there were a national fleet of battery-powered, or augmented, vehicles, could some proportion of these vehicles, when idle, be used to provide this energy storage? Could electric vehicles augment our own Turlough Hill energy storage scheme, releasing energy back to our national grid when needed, and when some vehicles are otherwise idle? Operations support systems for a network of recharging stations would take on a greater significance.

This concept of "Vehicle to Grid" is actively being explored by several projects across the EU, US and China. A large fleet of plug-in hybrid vehicles could, on average, push power back into a national grid at times of shortage.

Could we go further ? The real innovation may be to deploy advanced battery storage capability at as many consumption points as possible. Surplus direct generation from renewable generators could then be temporarily captured. When the wind is not blowing, these temporary but substantial and distributed energy stores could release energy back to a sufficiently intelligent national grid.

The secret with wind, as I discovered, is never to fight it, but to leverage it.