Windmills
I've always liked the look of windmills from the first time I saw them in America back in the 1990s. They are strong, majestic and are symbolic of society's move away from fossil fuels and nuclear power, which can only be positive from my perspective.
Wind energy has become important for Ireland and on a few days last year 85% of the power for or country came from wind energy, which is a huge achievement.
Before getting technical about windmills and the job they do for society, let's take a look at some pictures of these super structures on a sunny Spring day in West Galway. I Captured these photos on my Samsung smartphone.
Why Windmills?
Well, they are renewable and they simply require a certain wind speed range to create Electricity. Luckily here in Ireland, particularly in mountainous and coastal areas, we have plenty of these windy conditions, so wind energy makes sense. You'll see from the graph below that pre 1998 wind was not the dominant renewable energy here in Ireland. Rather we had Hydro electric and Biomass leading the way. That changed dramatically from 2004 onwards as more and more wind farms came on stream around Ireland. This growing wind farm base means that the country has a large and growing installed wind power capacity. We had 4,351 MW by the end of 2020, which produced 38% of all Ireland's electricity needs in 2020.
So where does all the energy go to by sector? I was quite surprised by this actually and transport is by far the biggest culprit.
The graph and pie chart above are not my own and this is the source: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Renewable_energy_in_the_Republic_of_Ireland
