The Marshall Review

There is a curious contradiction emerging in Ireland's energy transition.

For generations, energy policy was shaped by a simple assumption: there would never be enough electricity. The challenge was always to generate more, import more, build more capacity and ensure that demand could be met.

Today, a different kind of problem is beginning to emerge. At particular moments, Ireland has more renewable electricity than it can use. This is not a prediction. It is already happening.

According to EnergyCloud's latest assessment, drawing on EirGrid data to 31 July 2026, more than 2,540 GWh of renewable electricity has been dispatched down since the beginning of 2025. In simple terms, electricity that could have been generated could not be accommodated by the system and was therefore unused.

The figures are striking. EnergyCloud estimates the retail value of that energy at approximately €899 million. The numbers are large enough to attract attention, but they are also large enough to become abstract. Most of us struggle to visualise a gigawatt-hour, just as we struggle to picture a million euro beyond seeing a large number accompanied by a currency symbol. To put that figure in perspective, it is roughly comparable to the estimated cost of the proposed Shannon LNG terminal and would represent a substantial contribution towards the cost of a second Turlough Hill-scale storage project.

Yet another set of figures from the same report tells a different story. In the first seven months of 2026, EnergyCloud and its partners used signals from surplus renewable generation to heat more than 40,000 tanks of hot water for households experiencing energy poverty.

Suddenly the scale changes. The discussion is no longer about megawatts, dispatch-down, grid constraints or balancing markets. It is about a family having hot water.

The significance of this may extend beyond the immediate benefits provided by the scheme: for many years, energy policy has largely been framed as a problem of production. How do we generate enough electricity? How do we replace fossil fuels? How do we build renewable capacity quickly enough?

Important questions remain, but the appearance of renewable spillage suggests that another question is emerging. How do we connect available energy with human need? That is a subtly different challenge. The issue is not necessarily that resources are absent. The issue may be that they are disconnected.

A surplus exists in one place within the system. A need exists elsewhere. Between them lie infrastructure, market rules, technologies, institutions and habits that were designed for an earlier era. Seen this way, some forms of waste begin to look less like failures of production and more like failures of connection.

The EnergyCloud project is interesting precisely because it explores one possible connection. It does not solve Ireland's energy challenges. It does not eliminate dispatch-down. It does not remove the need for storage, grid reinforcement or interconnection. What it demonstrates is something simpler. It shows that surplus energy can become a signal. And once that happens, the definition of waste begins to change.

Historically, energy systems flowed in one direction. Electricity was generated at large power stations and delivered to customers. The relationship was straightforward.

Increasingly, however, modern energy systems are becoming networks of relationships. Storage responds to generation. Demand responds to availability. Electric vehicles become temporary energy assets. Hot water cylinders become thermal storage. Digital signals connect places of abundance with places of need. The system begins to behave less like a pipeline and more like an ecosystem.

This may turn out to be one of the most significant but least discussed aspects of the energy transition. The challenge is no longer simply generating renewable electricity. It is learning how to live within a system where energy arrives differently, moves differently and sometimes appears in unexpected abundance.

The EnergyCloud figures therefore point towards a larger question. If Ireland can identify periods of surplus renewable generation and use them to provide benefits for households today, what other connections become possible tomorrow? Community batteries. Flexible demand. Electric vehicle charging. District heating. New forms of social and economic infrastructure that have not yet fully emerged.

The answer may not lie in eliminating every unit of wasted energy. No system will ever be perfectly efficient. The more interesting possibility is that we are beginning to recognise resources that were previously invisible because we did not yet know how to connect them to the people who could use them.

Perhaps the story is not really about wasted electricity at all. Perhaps it is about a society learning to recognise that abundance and scarcity can exist in the same system at the same time, and learning how to connect one to the other. David Marshall Dublin

https://go.marshall.ie/energy-briefing-0-review

Readers interested in the wider context can explore the Energy Briefing Series, including Briefing 0 on Ireland's spilled energy problem. In the coming weeks, BriefMe.ie will bring together layered policy briefings designed to make complex issues accessible at different levels of depth, while NRJ.ie will follow the developments, projects and experiments that are shaping Ireland's energy future in real time.