EirGrid’s Group Strategy 2026 sets out an ambitious plan to transform Ireland’s electricity grid for a future where every home, business and community is powered by secure, clean and affordable electricity.
Following an allocation of €18.9 billion by Government and the regulator for investment in the electricity grid, the five-year strategy will enable EirGrid to deliver the most extensive programme of work ever undertaken on the State’s electricity system.
The strategy is built on four pillars: Keeping the State powered – ensuring a safe, secure and resilient electricity system every minute of every day; building the backbone – delivering grid infrastructure at pace and at scale; transforming for clean energy – enabling much higher levels of renewable electricity, clean technologies and a more flexible power system; and unlocking new frontiers – advancing offshore wind and interconnection to strengthen the Republic’s long-term energy independence
EirGrid chief operations officer Michael Kelly says that his role is to ensure the transformation is achieved while keeping the system stable and reliable at all times. “That’s front and centre for us,” he says.
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This is far from a simple undertaking. “Power systems often figure on lists of the top 10 most complicated machines ever made,” Kelly notes. “Top of the list is usually the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) in Switzerland. But when they want to do work on the LHC, they can take it offline for a few years. When we transform the power system, it has to remain up and running 24/7, safely and securely.”
He compares what he and his team do to conducting an orchestra. “There are different sections to an orchestra including brass, percussion and strings. For us, it’s power generation, the grid and demand from our customers. Historically, we conducted the orchestra to get different tunes for night and day.”
That was when there was a small number of large power stations feeding through to the grid and relatively predictable customer demand.
That has changed considerably. “The generation and demand sides are transforming,” he says. “We now have really good success stories like domestic rooftop solar. There are more than 150,000 installations and the number is increasing all the time. On the demand side, we now have a large number of small customers and a small number of very large customers. And all the time, we are trying to conduct the orchestra and get the right tune. If every part of the orchestra goes at the same pace, you have a stable system. But if one outpaces the others, you get problems. We need everything to work in a co-ordinated way.”
Rapid changes in demand and supply make this exceptionally difficult. To illustrate this, Kelly points to two consecutive days in April, one of which was sunny and the other quite dull.
“On the first day there was a lot of rooftop solar generated and demand was significantly reduced during daytime hours. It was very different the following day. Two to three years ago we had almost no solar generation. Now there are between 45 and 50 grid-scale solar farms generating 750MW of power and that’s growing all the time. Rooftop solar is growing at a thousand installations a week. The transmission systems needs to keep pace with that.”
EirGrid is also building towards the goal of 80 per cent of the electricity on the grid coming from renewable sources in the coming years. This will mean 9GW of onshore wind and 5GW of offshore wind connected to the grid.
“We have to get the grid ready for offshore wind,” says Kelly. “EirGrid has a new role as owner of the offshore transmission infrastructure, and we need to bring the power to where it will be consumed. We already have a lot of onshore wind with 170 wind farms connected to the power system. These are located predominantly around the south and west of the country while a lot of the demand is still concentrated on the east coast. Transporting power across the country is an infrastructural challenge.”
To meet that challenge, 381 transmission projects are planned over the next five years, with 29 of them identified as priority projects which will deliver the highest national benefit. These projects will involve significant grid upgrades, reinforcements and new builds.
Kelly says that these can be broken down into two types of projects: new connections and the system backbone. “New customers, both on demand and generation sides, require grid connections and that means new infrastructure, sometimes small, sometimes large,” he says. “That includes a large number of new homes. We need to have a transmission system capable of meeting demand where it is needed.”
Then there is the backbone. “It’s like a motorway: if we have to move power from the south to the east or from Dublin out to the rest of the country, that’s where the backbone of the system comes in. We ensure that the lights stay on while enabling the move to more and more renewables and indigenous energy sources and that will make us less susceptible to oil and gas price shocks in the future. That’s the service we provide to the country.”
