Posted online: May 7th, 2009

By Chris Ashmore
Donegal has the potential to sell millions of euro worth of electricity to Northern Ireland each year.
But problems getting wind farm projects connected to the national grid remain a stumbling block.
Donegal currently has several wind farm projects at various stages of the planning process.
But even if the go-ahead is given, the infrastructure to connect them is lacking in some areas.
One wind farm developer in the county is all set to go, but he reckons that it could be anything between and five and ten years before his project, in an isolated area, is connected.
Eirgrid, the national grid company, has plans to roll out higher voltage lines to connect into wind farms – but these are taking time.
As a wind industry source explained: “First, the electricity grid must be reconfigured to allow more wind farms to be connected. At present, it is too constrained to allow a steady increase in connections, most of which will be in the western seaboard areas.”
Recently a conference in the North heard that at present, the electricity grids, north and south, even with a “single electricity market,” cannot adequately cope with all the economic trading opportunities.
When Ireland has spare capacity from wind energy, as is now a predicted possibility, it might feed into the UK grid and when the Irish ‘single electricity market’ needs top-up, the flow could be into Ireland.