Doubling down on wind: Ireland greens its grid, looks to export

Colin Cleary, a State Department Foreign Service Officer on sabbatical in Dublin, Ireland, has an informative article in The Globalist, an online magazine, on how Ireland is using wind power to increase domestic electricity production and may be exporting wind-generated electricity to the U.K. as well.

In it, he writes in part, “Ireland already has one of the highest penetrations of wind power onto its grid in the world–now approaching 20%–and appears on track to meet its ambitious target of supplying fully 37% of its electricity from onshore wind by 2020.

“This is more than 10 times the current proportion of wind power supplied to the U.S. grid.”

Ireland, he adds, has been able to accommodate up to 50 percent of its supply being generated by wind power despite the fact that the island has an isolated utility system–a fact that makes it clear that there is plenty of room left for growth in U.S. wind generating capacity.

The full article can be found here.