Energy supplier Electric Ireland has announced that it will be pulling out of the residential Northern Ireland (NI) electricity market, of which it makes up 6%.
The company said it will continue to supply and support its residential customers during this transition, which involves working collaboratively with key stakeholders, including the Utility Regulator and its residential customers, to ensure what it called a “managed approach”.
Electric Ireland entered the NI residential market in 2015 and has 53,000 customers, who will now see “no immediate change” and will be contacted “directly in due course,” the firm said.
The supplier plans to continue to supply its NI business customers with electricity; the company accounts for approximately 35% of the total business market.
Growing renewables production
Northern Ireland’s energy market has been of great interest to the renewable energy sector for some time, as was explored in a previous Current± blog. This is predominantly because NI has been notably successful in producing clean electricity from renewable sources, primarily wind.
A figure produced by the Northern Ireland Statistics & Research Agency states that renewables provided 47.4% of the country’s electricity consumption between October 2022 and September 2023.
Over these 12 months, 83.8% of the renewable energy Northern Ireland produced was sourced from onshore wind power, followed by biogas at 6.2% and solar at 3.5%.
As of September 2023, the country housed 82 sites with 586 turbines, amounting to an installed capacity of 1.2GW.
Speaking in the aforementioned blog, David McNamara, head of renewables development at Irish energy provider ESB, also touched on the subject: “Wind, given its high load factors, will provide the bulk of the energy. Northern Ireland is facing the same challenges as Ireland in decarbonising its economy, and wind will do most of the heavy lifting in this space.”
In 2022, consumers in Northern Ireland avoided paying a collective total of £500 million, thanks to wind farms providing 42% of the nation’s electricity. One primary reason for avoiding paying extra on energy bills is that wind energy generation eliminated the need for large gas imports.
Consultancy firm Baringa said that on Tuesday, 8 March 2022, the combination of island-wide high winds and soaring gas prices delivered a total avoided cost of £38 million (€43 million) in just 24 hours. For the following year, Wind Energy Ireland also reported that Northern Irish wind farms saved a total of £243 million in 2023.
The organisation confirmed in its annual report that 35% of the whole island’s electricity was provided by wind farms, thus cutting out carbon costs.
It is also worth noting that steps are being taken to help expand the NI grid’s capabilities. A transmission licence application was made in May 2023 for a 700MW Northern Ireland-Scotland interconnector project.
Transmission Investment is exploring the LirIC Interconnector project, which aims to connect the two countries by the end of the decade. The independent transmission company said the project will require an investment of around £700 million.
Once fully operational, LirIC will be capable of providing up to 700MW of additional capacity between the Irish Integrated Single Energy market and the GB wholesale electricity market. This will enable power from renewable energy sources to be supplied in either direction with both Scotland and Ireland expanding these particular sectors.
Central to the project’s development are two convertor stations: one situated in Northern Ireland and another in Scotland. A 130km cable will then be used to link the two stations depending on the final route, the firm said.
