Quick Summary

The Climate Change Advisory Council’s Annual Review 2026: Electricity, published 13 May 2026, gives Irish operators the clearest official picture yet of why energy bills remain stubbornly high, and why the near-term outlook is volatile. Ireland now carries the highest household electricity prices in the EU, with wholesale rates nearly three times their 2020 level. The underlying cause is structural: the country is building renewable capacity far too slowly, wasting roughly 10% of the wind power it does generate, and plugging the gap with expensive imported fossil fuels. Until the grid catches up, every Irish business and public-sector body operating on market-linked tariffs is exposed to that volatility directly.

The good news, buried in the numbers, is that renewables demonstrably suppress prices on the days they run well. The policy question, and the operational one, is how to close the gap between now and the point where the grid can sustain that effect consistently.

Key Takeaways

Ireland added just 0.8 GW of new wind and solar in 2025, against the 2 GW per year needed to meet 2030 Climate Action Plan targets.
Around 10% of available renewable electricity was wasted in 2025 due to grid constraints, the highest dispatch-down rate since records began in 2016, representing an estimated €523 million in lost clean power.
Wholesale electricity averaged €94/MWh on high-wind days in March 2026 but jumped to €179/MWh when the system fell back on imported fossil fuels, a near-doubling driven by structural under-investment, not weather alone.
Ireland had the second-highest wholesale electricity prices in Western Europe in 2025, averaging €114.24/MWh versus an EU-27 average of €87.95/MWh.
The Council recommends a Budget 2027 grant for domestic battery storage and changeover switches, and SEAI piloting of renewable generation and storage at Community Support Centres in 2026, relevant precedents for schools, healthcare facilities, and community buildings.
The Critical Infrastructure Bill and Regional Renewable Energy Strategies are due for delivery by end-2026 and will shape grid capacity and support schemes for the next planning cycle.

The Numbers Behind Ireland’s Electricity Price Problem

Ireland’s electricity price position is not new, but the 2026 Review quantifies it more starkly than any previous official document. In 2025, the Irish Integrated Single Electricity Market recorded the second-highest wholesale electricity prices in Western Europe, averaging €114.24/MWh for the year against an EU-27 average of €87.95/MWh. Household retail prices went further: Ireland now has the highest household electricity prices in the entire EU, with 319,000 households in arrears on their bills.

For context, the 2025 wholesale average is still roughly 50% below the 2022 peak of €225.17/MWh triggered by the Russo-Ukrainian war, but it remains more than three times the 2020 average of €37.35/MWh. The structural cause is straightforward: gas-fired plants often set the market-clearing price in Ireland’s electricity market. Because prices are set at the marginal cost of the last generator needed to meet demand, not the average cost of all generation, when gas plants are needed, everyone pays gas prices.

That mechanism explains the most striking figure in the review. In March 2026, the average wholesale price was €94.20/MWh on days with the most wind energy and €179.10/MWh when the system was forced to rely on imported fossil fuels. That is not the difference between a good day and a bad day. It is the daily cost of an under-built grid.

What This Means for Operators on Market-Linked Tariffs

Businesses, schools, and public-sector bodies on pass-through or market-linked electricity contracts absorb this volatility directly. A facility running 500,000 kWh per year faces a potential annual cost difference of several tens of thousands of euro depending on how much of its consumption falls on high-wind versus low-wind days, and it has no control over which days those are. The Review makes clear that this structural exposure is not easing in the near term. The only reliable hedge at the operator level is reducing consumption, adding on-site generation, or both.

Why Renewable Capacity Is Not Keeping Pace

The Deployment Gap

Ireland ended 2025 with 7.7 GW of total installed renewables, 5.1 GW from onshore wind, 1.1 GW from grid-scale solar, 0.8 GW from rooftop solar, and 0.7 GW from other sources including hydro. Only 0.8 GW of new capacity was added across the full year: 0.6 GW of solar and 0.2 GW of wind. The Review notes this was far short of the 1.8 GW required for 2025 alone, and the cumulative shortfall means the annual rate now needs to reach 2.0 GW every year through 2030 just to hit the Climate Action Plan target of up to 23.6 GW.

Onshore wind is the sharpest underperformer. Despite starting the decade at 4.3 GW with a target of 6 GW by 2025, a gap that should have been achievable, capacity has grown by an average of only 0.16 GW per year, less than half the 0.34 GW minimum required. Just 185 MW of new wind was connected in 2025, against a target of 780 MW. The backlog is growing: at the end of 2025, 36 onshore wind projects representing 2.1 GW were still awaiting planning decisions.

The Wasted Wind Problem

Compounding the deployment gap is a grid infrastructure problem. In 2025, approximately 10% of available renewable electricity could not be used, the highest dispatch-down rate since records began in 2016. The Review estimates the value of that wasted wind energy at approximately €523 million in cleaner, cheaper electricity that never reached the network. This is power Ireland already paid to generate, effectively discarded because the grid cannot carry it.

The system non-synchronous penetration (SNSP) limit, a measure of how much non-synchronous renewable power the grid can handle at any moment, reached 75% in 2025, but missed its 85% target. Until grid reinforcement catches up, increasing renewable capacity alone will not solve the affordability problem; the infrastructure to use that power has to be built too.

Data Centre Demand Absorbing Renewable Gains

A less-discussed factor is erasing much of the progress being made on renewables. Data centre electricity demand has grown from 5% to more than 20% of national consumption since 2015, at an average year-on-year growth rate of 23%. Total national electricity demand rose 2.6% in 2025, more than double the EU average increase of 1%, almost entirely driven by data centres. The renewable electricity share of demand has consequently stagnated at around 40-41% since 2023, despite more capacity being added, because demand is growing as fast as supply.

Storm Éowyn and the Resilience Question

What Happened

In January 2025, Storm Éowyn left 768,000 customers without power, with some homes off the grid for up to 18 days. The outages triggered cascading failures across water supply, telecoms, and health services, the Review describes these as “interdependencies between systems” that amplify the impact of electricity disruption far beyond the electricity sector itself.

The National Climate Change Risk Assessment, published in June 2025, classifies disruption to energy distribution and transmission due to extreme wind as a high-priority climate risk. The Review treats Éowyn not as an exceptional event to be managed in hindsight, but as a signal of the kind of disruption that will recur as climate patterns intensify.

ESB Networks accumulated €37.1 million in regulatory penalties during the CRU’s Price Review 5 period for failing to meet unplanned outage targets, a number that puts the resilience deficit in financial terms.

Recommendations Directly Relevant to Operators

The Council makes several recommendations that have practical implications for facility managers, school principals, and operators of community or healthcare buildings:

Battery storage grant (Budget 2027): The Council recommends the Government reintroduce a grant for domestic battery storage and the installation of changeover switches as part of Budget 2027, prioritising low-income households, medically vulnerable individuals, and those most exposed to outages. While this recommendation is framed around households, the principle, and potentially the scheme design, is likely to extend to community and semi-public buildings. Facility managers running buildings with continuous-process operations or vulnerable occupants should be tracking this.

SEAI Community Support Centre pilots (2026): The Council recommends that SEAI begin piloting renewable electricity generation and storage retrofits at selected Community Support Centres in 2026, equipping them with reliable backup power. This is directly relevant to schools, GP practices, community halls, and similar facilities, both as a potential grant avenue and as a practical model for backup power design.

Large-scale backup for essential services: The HSE, Uisce Éireann, and telecoms operators are urged to urgently increase investment in large-scale low-emissions backup electricity solutions. For any operator supplying services to or co-located with these sectors, understanding the backup power plans of your utility and infrastructure providers is now a reasonable part of business continuity planning.

Definition: A changeover switch (also called a transfer switch) allows a building’s solar PV or battery storage system to operate independently from the grid during a power outage, rather than shutting down as most grid-tied systems do by default. Without one, a rooftop solar installation provides no power during a blackout.

Grid and Policy Reforms Due in 2026

Critical Infrastructure Bill

The Council’s first recommendation is that the Critical Infrastructure Bill, due for adoption in 2026, should designate electricity grid reinforcement projects for prioritised delivery, with clear timelines and accountability. Grid reinforcement is the upstream enabler of everything else: more renewable capacity, lower dispatch-down, better resilience. Without it, adding generation capacity does not fully translate into lower prices or greater security.

The Council is explicit that this prioritisation must not come at the cost of removing climate obligations from public bodies, and that private wires legislation, enabling direct supply from generators to large energy users, should exclude fossil fuel infrastructure entirely.

Regional Renewable Energy Strategies

The Council calls for Regional Renewable Energy Strategies, which translate national renewable targets into county-level plans and ultimately inform city and county development plans, to be adopted by end-2026. These strategies are the mechanism through which national ambition becomes local planning reality. For operators in sectors such as manufacturing, food production, or large retail, understanding the renewable energy trajectory of your county is relevant to long-term site energy planning.

RED III Transposition

Key permitting provisions of the amended EU Renewable Energy Directive III (RED III) were transposed into Irish law in August 2025, introducing mandatory timelines for renewable energy planning decisions. The Council is calling for DCEE to urgently prioritise the designation of renewables acceleration areas by Q4 2026. These areas will fast-track planning for wind and solar in locations with high potential and lower environmental conflict, relevant context for any business or institution considering on-site generation.

Frequently Asked Questions

Why are Irish electricity prices so much higher than the EU average?

The primary driver is that gas-fired plants frequently set the market-clearing price in Ireland’s electricity market. Because Ireland still relies heavily on gas generation to fill gaps when wind is low, the marginal price of electricity tracks global gas prices. In 2025, Ireland averaged €114.24/MWh versus an EU-27 average of €87.95/MWh. Countries with more nuclear or hydroelectric capacity, France in particular, at an average grid emissions intensity of just 22 g CO2 eq/kWh in 2024 compared with Ireland’s 226 g CO2/kWh, are less exposed to gas price swings.

Does Ireland becoming coal-free in June 2025 help with prices?

It is positive for emissions, coal contributed 7% of electricity sector CO2 despite accounting for only 1.3% of generation in 2025, so its removal is meaningful for the carbon footprint. But coal was not a significant price driver. Moneypoint, Ireland’s only coal plant, was already operating as an out-of-market generator of last resort running on oil, intended as a backup until approximately 2029. The coal-free milestone matters for decarbonisation; it does not directly reduce electricity bills.

What can a facility manager do right now, given the grid situation?

Three things are within an operator’s control regardless of grid policy. First, reduce consumption, an energy audit will identify where your largest waste streams are and what the payback looks like on fixing them. Second, monitor continuously, real-time visibility into consumption lets you act on anomalies and optimise scheduling around peak tariff periods. Third, assess backup power options, with a potential Budget 2027 battery storage grant on the horizon and SEAI piloting community storage this year, the timing for planning an on-site storage or generation project is improving.

Should I be worried about the conflict in Iran affecting my electricity bills?

The Review notes that the war in Iran (which began in February 2026) has affected international oil markets and petrol and diesel prices, but has had a more limited effect on international gas prices to date, and therefore a subdued impact on electricity prices compared with the 2022 Russo-Ukrainian energy shock. However, the situation is described as volatile. Early data showed the March 2026 wholesale average at €128.77/MWh, up 19% on February 2026. Suppliers are expected to absorb cost increases into customer bills over time.

Summary

The CCAC’s 2026 Electricity Review is an honest assessment of a system under structural strain. Electricity emissions fell 8.9% in 2025, the grid went coal-free in June, and renewables are demonstrably suppressing prices on the days they run, those are genuine positives. But the pace of renewable deployment is roughly half what is needed, 10% of available wind power is being wasted rather than used, and the structural dependence on gas is keeping bills high and volatile for every Irish operator.

The policy levers, the Critical Infrastructure Bill, Regional Renewable Energy Strategies, RED III transposition, and a potential battery storage grant, are the right tools. Whether they are delivered on the timelines the Council is calling for is a question for 2026 and beyond.

What is within an operator’s control today is straightforward: understand where your building’s energy is going, reduce what can be reduced, and consider what on-site generation or storage would mean for your cost base and resilience. The Review has reinforced that case with a national regulator’s authority. The structural conditions that make energy efficiency a sound investment have not changed, if anything, they have sharpened.