![Dave Kirwan, Bord Gais Energy chief executive. 'It would be wrong not to confront the fact that we absolutely need gas for this [climate] transition,' Photograph: Alan Betson](https://www.irishtimes.com/resizer/v2/NL4IP5DQWRBXLIOSCCSGQ5UYQU.JPG?auth=bd5dec78928b492c0f2ba207edac53002b059f1abebfac0554038f345997f563&smart=true&width=1024&height=683)
If things had been just a little different, Dave Kirwan “would not be sitting here now”, he says. We are in Bord Gáis Energy’s office on Dublin’s Warrington Place, where he is country chair of the electricity and natural gas supplier, a job he combines with head of power, a senior group management post with its owner, British utility Centrica.
In 2023, Bord Gáis stopped passing on surging energy prices to its customers, leaving it with a loss on the business of supplying them with electricity and gas. Its power generation operation bailed it out, leaving the Irish business with a €2 million profit for the year.
“We just about broke even,” Kirwan says. “We had reached a point where people could not bear any more, we had to suck it up.”
The result prompted its plc parent to question whether it should be in this country at all, particularly as it was about to spend €300 million here building new power plants.
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Despite the 2023 losses, Chris O’Shea, Centrica’s chief executive, and the board agreed to back Kirwan when he argued that the business could get back on track.
The company proceeded with plans to build power stations. It also turned its gas boiler servicing arm into a broader operation that does retrofitting, fits EV chargers and supplies solar power to farmers among other things. That is turning a profit now.
“They allowed me do all that when we were losing money,” Kirwan notes.
While he dubs 2023 an “annus horribilus” it marked the point at which Bord Gáis began investing what will be €1 billion here by 2028. “We’re putting more money into Ireland now than ever in the history of Centrica,” he says.
That includes three so-called peaking plants in Athlone, Dublin and Galway. These are designed to start up quickly to supply electricity at times of high demand when renewables are either not available or cannot provide the power that customers need.
“They will deliver power at pace when it is needed,” Kirwan explains. “We are currently identifying sites and intend to submit bids for long-duration storage using next-generation batteries. We are also investing in the restoration of Kinsale gasfield with Dcarbonx and ESB. We are spending money on that at the moment.”
The now empty Kinsale gasfield, the reason Bord Gáis came into being as a State-owned entity in the first place, could be used to store the fuel here. Gas provides about half the electricity used in Ireland as well as powering key industries, but the country is one of the few in Europe with no place to store it. Kinsale could ultimately hold hydrogen, tipped as a possible replacement for fossil fuels in the future.
In a move that would have resulted in Bord Gáis spending multiples of €1 billion, the company joined with ÉDF Renewables to bid for a contract to build and run an offshore wind farm off the coast of Ireland capable of supplying enough electricity to power almost one million homes.
ÉDF Renewables is part of Électricité de France, one of Europe’s biggest energy companies with businesses in multiple countries that last year generated sales of almost €120 billion and profits of €15 billion.
The partnership did not win out. The Government announced this week that a joint venture between State-owned ESB and Danish group Ørsted was the successful bidder.
However, Kirwan hopes this will not end collaboration with the French giant. “I got to know ÉDF through our [Centrica’s] nuclear interests in the UK, where I am on the board. Centrica/BGE find an alignment of values with ÉDF as an organisation. We very much enjoyed working with ÉDF Renewables on this. I’d hate for it to be the last time.”
His involvement with Centrica’s nuclear business is part of his other role as the group’s head of power. The group this year took 15 per cent of Sizewell C, a £38 billion (€43 billion) power plant whose other backers include ÉDF, the UK government, Quebec’s state pension fund, La Caisse and specialist investor Amber Infrastructure.
It will have a capacity of 3,260 mega watts (MW), which is roughly half the electricity that the Republic would consume on a cold December evening, and a lifespan of decades.
Kirwan was closely involved in Centrica’s bid to take part in the project. “I’ve been on the board of our nuclear business for 3½ years,” he says. “I oversaw the technical diligence on Sizewell C. The amount of people working on this from Centrica was stunning and it was 2½ years. I bear with me responsibility for reflecting amazing work by all those people, and delivering the end result, which is clean fuel at least over a 60- to 80-year time frame in the UK.”
Kirwan is also responsible for Centrica’s side of a project to pilot a modular nuclear reactor at Hartlepool with US developer X-Energy. “This is different, this is small nuclear deployable in packs of four by 80MW on a footprint of 400m, whereas the old nuclear plants needed a radius of 10 miles [16.1km],” he explains.
The fuel self-cools and shuts down in real emergency situations, he adds. These plants will take five years to build, against 10 to 15 for projects such as Sizewell, while the amounts of waste are low and more manageable.
“It reminds me of the revolution in power generation in the 1970s when GE and Siemens found a way to develop gas turbines, and replicate them and ship them all over the world,” he says. “What they were able to do was to increase their efficiency and cut the cost of them.”
If that pattern is repeated, it would result in a central manufacturer sending nuclear plants to sites all over the world, with the exact same design aimed at increasing efficiency and reducing costs and, Kirwan says, “zero carbon”.
“That means you are going to drive down the cost of low carbon,” he says. “It’s guaranteed to run for 80 years, and the cost of deploying, and the time to deploy, is of a different scale versus old nuclear.”
In its current state, the minimum size needed to make a nuclear plant viable is 3,000MW, far too large for the Irish market, which does not use much more than twice that amount of electricity at its absolute winter peaks. Any problem with a single facility that size would shut down the entire system.
But modular technology – should it pass all regulatory hurdles – would allow developers to build power plants of a similar size to Bord Gáis’s gas-fired Whitegate facility, which has a capacity of about 400MW, and run them economically.
The Electricity Regulation Act, 1999 bans the use of nuclear power in the Republic. That, widespread caution about the technology, and the fact that projects on Sizewell C’s scale are just too big for this country mean many dismiss the prospect of it ever being used to generate power here.
However, industry figures have recently begun arguing that the State at least needs to have a debate on its use. Nuclear power is cheap and carbon-free, which is one of the reasons that countries such as the UK, which has Europe’s biggest wind energy industry, are investing billions in new plants.
Brendan Tuohy, chairman of national electricity grid company this year argued that it was one of the options the State needed to consider to counter the fact that wind and solar cannot generate electricity all the time. He noted that other countries include nuclear in their energy mix, giving them a competitive edge over the Republic in terms of attracting investment.
Tuohy is a former secretary general of the Department of Communications, Energy and Natural Resources (now Climate, Energy and the Environment) and understands the delicate politics of this issue, so his remarks made a few people sit up.
“The question for Ireland is this: can we afford not to look at nuclear when you consider the next generation of technology? Because if America and other European states adopt modular technology, and it proves to be efficient and net-zero, and we choose not to, will we render ourselves uncompetitive?” Kirwan says.
“From a scientific and engineering perspective, I have a front-row seat. I’m becoming incredibly persuaded that this could work. If it does work, it’s a game-changer in terms of the reliability of net-zero energy to complement wind, not to replace it. If the energy efficiency and the capital efficiency delivers like the old gas turbines, Ireland not being involved could render itself uncompetitive. I worry about that as an Irish person.”
He understands that this country has to get over concerns, sparked mostly by others’ negative experiences of nuclear power, but adds that is a political challenge.
Kirwan has spent 34 years in the energy industry. From Tullow in Co Carlow, he studied engineering in UCD before joining the ESB graduate programme. He went abroad “pretty quick”, believing he’d learn more. That took him to the US to work with ESB International, then on to Vietnam to work on World Bank-backed power stations in the south of the country.
He joined the then State-owned Bord Gáis in 1999, as his wife was working in Cork, where the company had its headquarters. Kirwan did an MBA in UCC, then went to Northern Ireland to set up a gas business, supplying the fuel to areas outside Belfast that did not have it. He returned to Cork to develop a power plant at Whitegate, adding a wind energy business for good measure and then ended up running the company when Centrica bought most of the business.
In 2017, he joined Centrica, working in the UK for a while before returning to the Republic in 2021 to retake the helm at his old employer. Shortly afterwards, he found himself in a “perfect storm” as the energy and cost-of-living crises struck, driven by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and the post-Covid lockdown rebound.
That experience demonstrated the vulnerabilities of our energy system, although Kirwan did not need any reminding. Gas, a key part of his company’s business and the reason it came into being in the first place, remains vital to this country and he argues that it will play a central role in aiding us to end fossil-fuel dependence.
“It would be wrong not to confront the fact that we absolutely need gas for this transition,” Kirwan warns. The overseas investors on which our economy depends will move in two or three years without reassurance that energy supplies here are secure.
“The stats are stark,” he says. “Germany has 24 billion cubic metres of gas storage, which is the equivalent of 89 days demand. They are one of the best interconnected systems in Europe. They UK has 3.5 billion. It’s lower in the league table but that’s equivalent to 12 days of demand. Ireland has zero.”
Kirwan is not the first to highlight that we do not store the fuel most critical to our energy system. Nor will he be the last. This lack of State planning is one of the reasons that Bord Gáis is spending money on restoring the Kinsale field, along with ESB and Dcarbonx.
Bord Gáis is investing against a slightly more benign background than this time two years ago. Energy supplies returned to profit in 2024, but margins remained below what the business would have earned had it been subject to the British price cap that governed what Centrica charged customers in its home territory.
Kirwan cautions that this is a very competitive market, where large numbers of customers switch in search of better deals and challenges anyone who thinks energy companies are greedy or make supernormal profits to look at the facts. Meanwhile, he says the company will continue investing, on big projects and on keeping switch-prone customers.
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It’s still a tough market, he says, but adds: “I’m feeling better about it than I did in 2023”.
CV
Name: Dave Kirwan
Job: Country chair Bord Gáis Energy, head of power Centrica
Why is he in the news? His company is investing €1 billion on power plants and boosting its services.
Family: Married with four children
Hobbies: He coaches in Dublin GAA club Kilmacud Crokes and enjoys reading and spending time with family.
Something we might expect: He’s an avid reader of business books.
Something that might surprise: He spent part of his early career helping to build power plants in Vietnam.
