
Introduction
Responding to the immense challenge of Climate Change requires a radical transformation to deliver a clean, safe and sustainable society for future generations. The all-island electricity system in Ireland is a leader in decarbonisation, with ambitious targets for the 2030 horizon, about which you can read more here . EirGrid, the transmission system operator of the Republic of Ireland, who is responsible for delivering secure, sustainable, and green electricity to the people of Ireland, is a frontrunner in moving towards the decarbonisation of the electricity network. Let’s see how successful Ireland has been so far, in terms of accommodating renewable energies within its electricity system. Let’s take a quick look at the progress to date!
"Let them [people] rise to the challenges of the sustainable development goals, and act, not out of self-interest, but out of common interest. I am very aware of the preciousness of time. Seize the moment. Act now.”
Stephen Hawking, Brief Answers to the Big Questions
Before going into detail, I should clarify that when we talk about renewable energies such as wind turbines or solar panels, we can talk about either large scale projects, which require tremendous lands known as wind/solar farms, or smaller devices that you might have on the roof of your house or in your garden. Here, we are talking about the large-scale renewable energy generators, which produce significant levels of electricity.
Preparing Data
EirGrid publishes electricity system information and technical reports regularly on its website [1]. Also you can find interesting graphs and data concerning the Irish power system on the EirGrid smart dashboard, following this link [2]. I got the data from Eirgrid’s website (from both PDF documents and Excel files) and modified them according to my interest, on a yearly basis, because I wanted to see how renewable generation has advanced over the last few years.
Presenting Data
I don’t want to talk either technically or in detail. I just want to give some insight to those who might be interested in learning about the progress of renewable energies in the electricity network. What we are trying to do as engineers is to find solutions to accommodate more and more shares of renewable energies in the network. Look at this GIF below, showing how Ireland becomes greener in terms of accommodating more wind power in its production side; the darker the green, the higher the share of wind power in the Irish electricity network. On average, we had 19.89% of total Irish demand being supplied by wind in 2014, which jumped to roughly 38% by the end of 2020.

Now I want to show you where the most of wind turbines are placed in Ireland. Look at the GIF below, showing the wind turbine installation progress from 2008 to 2020, each circle representing one wind turbine. Red circles represent the new wind turbines in each year and the blue circles illustrate the accumulative wind turbines from the previous years. Also, the green background of the map, is showing the installed capacity of wind turbines in each region, and the darker it is, the more wind capacity has been installed in that region.
As an international resident in Ireland, I always heard of the windy weather in the west of Ireland. After working with the dataset I have now a good sense of Ireland’s windy places. Also, I should confess I thought we don’t have any city windier than Dublin!
Look to the west at counties Kerry, Cork, and Galway, and how green they are! They are the top wind turbines’ homes in Ireland and are helping the Irish electricity network to become greener!

But this is not the whole story. There are a lot of technical and financial obstacles that stop system operators from accommodating more and more renewables, and that’s the reason we call it an ambitious target to have tremendous shares of renewables like wind turbines in our electricity networks. Specifically, when we talk about an electricity network like Ireland which is less connected to its neighbours, compared to other EU countries, due to its geographical position which, of course, demands greater efforts to remedy the technical challenges ahead.
A Bit of Technical Talk
For those who might be interested to know more details, I want to talk about the term SNSP i.e. system non-synchronous penetration. In simple terms, SNSP is indeed showing the penetration level of converter interfaced generating units (such as HVDC interconnectors, batteries, wind, and solar panels) in comparison to total electricity demand and it is a proxy to protect the security of the system. The necessity of an SNSP limit is one of the obstacles that hinders electricity system operators in accommodating more renewables, as the security and reliability of the electricity system is threatened at very high levels, which is always the first priority! The higher SNSP, the less robust the system is to faults and outages. Ireland has recently hit the 70% variable renewable electricity instantaneous target in 2021, which is indeed a great accomplishment and it means the country could supply 70% of its electricity demand by renewables! Let’s take a look at the SNSP rate within the last few years in Ireland. In the GIF below, I show the maximum SNSP of each year. We chose maximum here since it is representing the instantaneous penetration on the system, and the ability of EirGrid to push its boundaries to have more renewables, while the security of the system is managed. The maximum SNSP of the year has been increased from 53.55% in 2014 to 67.4% in 2020 and 70% in 2021 which is HUGE progress for Ireland!

Python codes
You might be interested in plotting choropleth map for your work because they are not only illustrative but also pretty which are two main fundamentals of visualising data. In my next article, I will explain how to make a choropleth map in Python step by step. It is worth to note that I have been inspired by these two articles [3,4] on Towards Data Science.
Contributors
Dr. Ciara O’Dwyer who helped in preparing this brief article by giving advice and comments on the work.
Acknowledgement

I want to acknowledge UCD energy institute and ESIPP group for supporting me. Plus, I recommend you have a look at my colleagues’ interesting works in this institute.
Disclaimer
This work is just based on public online data for showing Irish electricity network improvement in terms of renewable energies and authors do not guarantee the results of this work.
References
[3]: A Complete Guide to creating Choropleth Maps in Python, Towards Data science; Oct. 4, 2020 https://towardsdatascience.com/a-complete-guide-to-creating-choropleth-maps-in-python-728ee2949db4
[4] Let’s make a map! Using Geopandas, Pandas and Matplotlib to make a Choropleth map; Jun 25, 2018. https://towardsdatascience.com/lets-make-a-map-using-geopandas-pandas-and-matplotlib-to-make-a-chloropleth-map-dddc31c1983d