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It’s a topic that pops up every now and then in the news and seems to be a pet project of Energy Minister Eamonn Ryan’s. This electricity interconnector that we are told is vital for the country. So vital infact that there is a rather swish website extolling the virtues of it and how it will increase competition in the electricity market etc, etc.

From what I can gather is that it will cost in the region of €100m which is being provided by the European Union as part of a €5bn Europe wide stimulus package to encourage growth in alternative energy production. Or at least that is according to this article in the Irish Times from January.

Now I’m all for cheaper electricity and a cleaner environment and all that other tree hugging guff but this interconnector has me a little curious. Is is really necessary? After all there appears to be one in place already connecting our friends in the North to the U.K. national grid. Indeed Bernie Goldbach recently brought to my attention this site which provided statistics on the U.K. National Grid. Of which the most recent update shows that in the past 24 hours the U.K.  had:

A demand of 41721MW
N.Ireland to Great Britain: -293MW
France to Great Britain : 1253MW
North-South: 7297MW
Scot – Eng: 313MW

Correct me if I’m wrong but that update was at 11am this morning (15th April) and it shows that Great Britain actually imported 293MW from Northern Ireland.

Regardless does this not prove that there is already an internconnector in place? Surely it would be much cheaper to build a few pylons actoss the border instead of laying a 185Km submarine cable?

I suppose it is all down to capacity. The new cable will have a capacity of 500MW so perhaps the existing one in the North would not be up to the task. But to come back to the guff that is in that Irish Times article above. One of the key reasons for this €5bn investment in the first place is in the words of Jose Manuel Barrosso “We need to learn the lessons of the recent gas crisis and invest heavily in energy.”

I can’t help feeling that this interconnector would be unnecessary if the theiving gits in government here hadn’t given away our own natural gas deposits to Shell. I wonder out of curiosity how many years the Corrib gas field supply would allow us to be energy independent for?