Eleven trade bodies tell Brussels to let Ireland trade renewable gas

This one is the sequel to the piece we launched with. Eleven European energy trade bodies, among them Eurogas, Energy Traders Europe, ENTSOG, Europex and the ERGaR renewable gas registry, wrote jointly to the European Commission on 27 May. They are asking Brussels for two things. The first is to recognise Ireland as part of the EU interconnected gas grid and its mass balancing system. The second is to let renewable gas from third countries, the UK included, into the Union Database.

Why now comes down to a Commission opinion on Ireland's Renewable Heat Obligation notification, reference 2025/786/IE. It found that no pipeline biomethane from the UK or continental Europe can count towards Ireland's RED target for as long as the UK stays outside the Union Database. Our only gas link to the continent runs through Britain, so we end up physically connected to the European grid but locked out of the compliance tools every other member state gets to use.

For a supplier carrying an obligation under the RHO, that makes an already hard sum harder. If you cannot import, your renewable gas has to come from Irish anaerobic digestion, and we are chasing 5.7 TWh by 2030 off a base that needs something like 150 plants. The signatories want an interim fix rather than a wait for the UK to join the database. They point to the solidarity provisions for indirectly connected member states in the 2024 gas regulation, and to the mass balancing rules that, on their reading, never asked for a direct physical connection in the first place. The decision now sits with DG ENER.

Also in biomethane, a grid connection and a bit of AI

Gas Networks Ireland signed an agreement on 27 May to connect Stream BioEnergy's €80m, 80 GWh Cork plant to the grid. Separately, the Irish Farmers Journal reported a new AI system going into anaerobic digestion plants to fine tune the feedstock mix and lift yield.

Waterford puts an electric truck on the road, and the bigger question behind it

Waterford City and County Council added its first electric HGV to the fleet on 29 May. What it is good for is the bigger question of where heavy goods electrification actually sits in 2026, because the honest answer is more advanced than most people think and more constrained than the headlines suggest.

Electric trucks work today where the route is predictable and the vehicle comes home to a depot each night. Volvo, DAF, MAN and Renault Trucks are all shipping models that do 300 to 500 km on a charge depending on load and hills, which covers regional distribution and municipal rounds but not yet unbroken long haul. The batteries keep getting denser and cheaper. The chargers keep getting faster and more available. The real bottleneck is the grid. A yard full of electric trucks is a substation sized load, so ESB Networks connections and depot upgrades will set the pace more than the trucks themselves.

If you want to see where this goes, look at China. Michael Liebreich points out that one heavy truck in four sold there in 2025 was electric, up from about 1% in 2021, while hydrogen truck sales quietly collapsed to nothing. One new vehicle in four worldwide is now electric, one in five in Europe.

The electric trucks are coming fast, but the diesel fleet already out there will not retire quickly enough to hit the 2030 and 2040 transport targets on new vehicles alone. The EPA's own transport maths leans on exactly this combination, 751,000 EVs by 2030 plus more biofuel in the blend, to get a cut of up to 28%. HVO is a drop in renewable diesel that decarbonises the loads electrification cannot reach yet. It is not where we end up. It is how we get there.

The EPA puts a number on the gap

The EPA's latest projections confirmed what we already kind of knew. On the best case, Ireland cuts emissions 25% by 2030 against the 51% the law requires, and if we only do what we are already doing it is more like 13%. It is a small improvement on last year's range, but Director General Eimear Cotter was plain that almost every sector is off track, and she singled out delayed offshore wind as a big part of why the achievable number has slipped.

Data centres, the jobs case and the new connection rules

A KPMG report for the Department of Enterprise this week put a number on the upside. Capping data centre growth could cost up to 94,000 jobs and €1.6bn a year in employment taxes by 2030, and as many as 876,000 jobs lean on having that capacity here. Data centres take about a fifth of our electricity today, and EirGrid expects that past 30% by 2030.

The new large energy user connection policy is built to let that growth happen on terms that work for the system. New data centres can connect if they bring their own dispatchable generation, storage or thermal, and source around 80% of their demand from renewables. Done right, that turns data centre demand into a reason to build more clean power and more storage rather than a drain on what is already there.

Gas security flares up again, and Europe starts paying for storage

Dan O'Brien reopened the security of supply argument this week, setting Germany's hundred day dash to floating LNG in 2022 against Ireland still leaning on two pipelines from Britain for roughly 80% of its gas.

On 1 June the Netherlands signed off a subsidy worth up to €993m for its state company EBN to fill as much as 80 TWh of strategic storage if the market will not, with European gas up about 48% since the Gulf conflict began and EU stores barely 40% full against a normal 54%.

While Ireland works through emergency reserve legislation and An Coimisiún Pleanála is still to deliver a final planning decision on Shannon LNG, our neighbours are writing billion euro cheques to fill the storage they already have.

How the grid actually ran in May

The May numbers are worth pausing on. Green Collective's Currents put renewables at 38% of all island demand, the highest share ever recorded in a May, even with demand up about 4% on last year. Fossil generation came in at 43.9%, the lowest ever for the month. As recently as 2019, fossil fuel was supplying three quarters of May demand, so the direction of travel is not subtle. Solar broke every record it had, hitting 32% of all island demand at one point on 24 May, and 37% in the Republic on its own.

Wind dispatch down ran at about 18% for the month, most of it down to transmission constraints rather than oversupply, which is the grid telling us it cannot move the power from where the wind is to where the demand sits. And discharging storage was flat at 42.3 GWh, almost exactly the same as last May.

Storage gets its day at the Oireachtas, and a word on home batteries

Energy Storage Ireland went in front of the Oireachtas Joint Committee on Climate, Environment and Energy on 27 May, speaking for more than 80 member companies. The pitch to a committee that has spent recent sessions worrying about consumer prices was a plain one. We are throwing away clean wind that storage could be soaking up. ESB Networks has now passed 1 GW of connected storage, 731.5 MW of batteries plus 292 MW at Turlough Hill, but that flat storage figure from May tells you the build rate is not where it needs to be. The gap to the roughly 500 MW of long duration storage that DECC's 2024 framework wants on the transmission system is the one to keep an eye on.

There is a household version of this too. BloombergNEF found battery costs hit fresh record lows last year even as solar and wind got a touch dearer, and the Guardian ran a good piece on 31 May on how cheap home storage is getting. Irish homes are putting solar on the roof at a fair clip, but there is no SEAI grant for the battery to go with it. Bring that grant back and you let households move cheap daytime solar or night rate electricity into the evening, which softens their own bill.

The bigger picture, Liebreich on the acceleration

Worth ending the news on Michael Liebreich's blog from 27 May, The Great Clean Energy Acceleration 2.0. His argument is that clean energy, with a little help from nuclear, is now set to mop up all the growth in total energy demand rather than just electricity, which would bring peak fossil fuel use and peak emissions forward to before 2030. He reads the Gulf conflict and the closure of the Strait of Hormuz the way he read the 2022 Ukraine spike, as something that speeds the shift up rather than slowing it down.

Ireland Commercial Feasibility Assessment for production of eSAF

It asks whether synthetic aviation fuel, e-kerosene, can be made commercially here. That matters because ReFuelEU sets a rising synthetic fuel share, 1.2% from 2030 and 5% by 2035, and eSAF is the green hydrogen and captured CO₂ route that ties aviation straight to our hydrogen plans.

Review of the infrastructure for aviation fuel transport and storage

It looks at how aviation fuel moves through and is stored in the State. You cannot blend a fuel you cannot physically handle, so this is the unglamorous logistics half of the same job, whether Dublin and Shannon can take blended and eventually synthetic product.

Meath County Council · lands for a future Green Energy Park

A call for expressions of interest, open now at consult.meath.ie. The council is looking for sites that could be zoned to bring renewable generation, storage, large energy users and low carbon industry together in one place, off the back of an independent study by Infranua and ENVARQ. This is zoning led by infrastructure, a council trying to solve the grid and land problem before developers and data centres start fighting over the same constrained patch of network. If it works, other local authorities will copy it.

Also open. SEAI's National Energy RD&D programme, a €20m call that now includes the offshore Renewable Energy RDD+ strand. And the DCEE District Heating Pre-Construction Fund, with expressions of interest open. EirGrid's AIRAA methodology consultation has now closed, it shut at 4pm on 27 May.