A closer look at Friday, which saw an unprecedented *two* major records broken on the Irish grid in a single day: battery discharge and solar output.
Batteries met roughly 4.5% of the morning peak load, while solar met almost 7% of the entire day's demand 🔋 ☀️
There is no single “correct” path to decarbonise.
There are six trillion.
Our new paper in Science puts 36 climate solutions into one common unit, so you can build your own pathways.
Paper: doi.org/10.1126/scie...
App: climatewedges.com
What would your pathway look like?
🚨 No need to wait for our next newsletter!
As we predicted just last weekend in the premium edition of "Irish Grid Monthly", solar output on the island of Ireland reached a new all-time high yesterday: 889MW, equal to 17.5% of electricity demand at 1.15pm.
🥇 ☀️
Will AI and data centres be the main drivers of future electricity demand?
No. The biggest drivers will be the electrification of industry, transport and buildings. When powered by clean electricity, the benefits are fundamental: vastly higher efficiency, dramatically lower emissions & cleaner air.
Interesting to see how this pans out
"Galway City Council is intent on progressing a pedestrian and bicycle link across the stone abutments of the former Clifden Railway Bridge, despite national funding cancelled for this piece of the Connemara Greenway"
www.advertiser.ie/galway/artic...
Assuming a ring road is in place by 2040, the report suggests a short-term alleviation of traffic flow in the city centre after 2030. “However, increased transport demand will eventually result in the bypass becoming congested without further intervention,” the report warns.
Export restrictions introduced since April 2025 have pushed rare earth prices up sharply in importing countries
European prices reached up to six times higher than in China, making rare earth products manufactured outside China far less cost-competitive 👉 iea.li/4oPKO7D
Humans for the Grid: Why the world’s most critical infrastructure still needs human mappers 🌍⚡
Discover why human mappers in OpenStreetMap are the cornerstone of the global energy data ecosystem. Read our latest blog post. 👉 mapyourgrid.org/blog/2025120...
#mapyourgrid #openstreetmap #opendata
Renewable generation and discharging storage equalled 73% of yesterday's electricity demand, with a peak of 87% at 05:00. Fossil fuel generation (mostly gas) equalled 25% of demand. 3% of generation was exported, 5% of demand was met by imports.
🚨Our dashboard caught a new all-island wind output record this morning: 4671MW at 9:30am on Friday, 5 December!🚨
www.greencollective.io/records
A closer look at yesterday's all-time high for wind power:
- occurred during the Friday morning peak
- 4671MW, or about 75% of electricity demand at the time
- finally beats the 4629MW seen in March 2024
A green day for all the tellies and kettles during the Toy Show! 🪀
#SpeirGorm #LateLateToyShow
Tarriffs times are
Max Price: 5pm-7pm,
Average Price: 7pm-11pm,
Low price (Off Peak): 11pm-2am,
Very low price (EV charging): 2am-5am,
Low price (Off Peak): 5am-8am,
Average price: 8am-5pm.
In our house the car charges from 2- 5am. flexible loads clothes washing machine or dishwasher 11pm - 8am
Pod of this week’s Last Word on environment with Matt Cooper on Today FM now available. We did a wrap-up on highs & (mostly) lows of #Cop30, plus we discussed why Iceland is making emergency preparations for possible AMOC shutdown - why isn’t Ireland doing likewise?
www.todayfm.com/podcasts/the...
Renewable generation and discharging storage equalled 39% of yesterday's electricity demand, with a peak of 68% at 03:45. Fossil fuel generation (mostly gas) equalled 49% of demand. 2% of generation was exported, 13% of demand was met by imports.
The first ever in-person #MapYourGrid meeting took place at State of the Map Europe in Dundee. Thank you, #SotMEU2025, for giving us the opportunity to run a one-hour workshop. A recording will be posted soon. @openinframap.org @russ.garrett.co.uk #OpenStreetMap #openenergy
Renewable generation and discharging storage equalled 51% of yesterday's electricity demand, with a peak of 92% at 01:00. Fossil fuel generation (mostly gas) equalled 37% of demand. 4% of generation was exported, 16% of demand was met by imports.
Búzios Scientific Statement
100 climate researchers, coordinated by @pik-potsdam.bsky.social & @iiasa.ac.at, released a joint statement to inform the #COP30 negotiations and provide guidance on difficult but doable global efforts designed to limit dangerous overshoot of 1.5°C as much as possible.
The same for journalists. If a politician or business leader spits out 1.5C or net zero, ask them how fast emissions need to drop to reach net zero in 2050, and how fast they are dropping today. Point out the contradiction. Make them explain it.
Yesterday's metered data is out and...the new real-time battery data is looking good!
*Delighted* to finally have batteries in our daily reports: it was the last piece of the puzzle and, hopefully, with this new scheduling and dispatch system, they'll be meeting more and more of demand 🔋
Interesting that they are shaving the high morning ramp rates rather than evening peak high cost electricity - if I'm reading that right. Different to the dynamics from Casio for example. Any data on when batteries are charging the 24hours before?
Electrotech is making its way around the world, as China’s clean technology exports hit a RECORD $20bn in August ⚡
This new high was due to rapid growth in:
🚗 EVs
🔋 Batteries
And over HALF of this growth occurred in countries outside of the OECD #COP30
https://loom.ly/upwIj00
Realities of start-up world aired at Founders’ Exchange in Galway’s PorterShed www.siliconrepublic.com/start-ups/fo...
What's (almost) as good as a new high in renewable generation? A new *low* in fossil fuel generation 🏭
Find out more in our October 2025's "Irish Grid Monthly", now available to all our newsletter subscribers. Free sign-up link in our profile!
Most of Ireland's uplands are commonage, ie co-owned by local farmers.
The ONLY real income from commonage is via subsidies, almost always for ecosystem-killing sheep. This is why Irish mountains are all empty wastelands, kept that way by your taxes.
Why are we STILL not paying farmers to rewild??
Thanks @hannahdaly.ie for this shout-out to Green Collective in today's Irish Times! We're delighted to be included in this sweeping review of the incredible growth of solar around the world last few years 🌍 🌎 🌏
BTW, we can report generation from Irish solar farms reached 1TWh during September ☀️
"No more climate change worship", Hegseth tells US military leaders 🙄.
They know a lot better.
I know that first hand, having been invited to speak at a NATO workshop on Climate Change Security.
Climate science is not woke or religion or whatever, it’s hard-core physics and data analysis.
Research Scholar/Modeler – Global Climate System 🔴Deadline: today!
Develop open-source tools for greenhouse gases, aerosols & radiative forcing; work with @carlschleussner.bsky.social and Keywan Riahi
Renewable generation (that's biomass, hydro, wind, and solar) never dipped below 50% of electricity demand yesterday. Overnight, it exceeded 100% for a little while around 1am.
This is still rare outside of the winter: we saw it in Aug/Sep 2023, only in winter in 2024, and now in Aug/Sep 2025.
On Monday, large-scale solar generation in Ireland reached a new high of 934MW; about 19% of the island's electricity demand at the time ☀️
This took us by surprise - it's nearly October! It seems transmission constraints on the grid were notably lower than usual, perhaps due to extremely low winds.
💡 Do you have a research project in mind that will help fossil fuel–dependent communities navigate the energy transition?
The Resilient Energy Economies Initiative is awarding research grants—apply before October 31! www.resilientenergyeconomies.org/grants
Watch this short video for more info 👇