Just before Christmas, when Ireland’s new electricity network investment framework was approved, Minister for Energy Darragh O’Brien reached for a meaningful historical comparison. The country, he said, was entering “the most significant period of energy infrastructure development since rural electrification”. In the construction industry, few are inclined to dispute him.
The Commission for the Regulation of Utilities approved a baseline investment of €13.8 billion in Ireland’s electricity networks for 2026 to 2030, rising to €18.9 billion under a mechanism that unlocks additional funding where needed. Known as Price Review 6, or PR6, it represents an 80 per cent increase on the previous five-year cycle.
For Diarmuid O’Sullivan, director, energy sector, Sisk, one of Ireland’s largest construction groups, the scope extends well beyond the grid itself. He describes investment flowing across three categories: generation, covering wind, solar, gas peaking and data centre power; transmission, including big interconnectors such as the MaresConnect, a proposed Ireland-Wales subsea link and a longer-term connection to Spain; and enabling infrastructure such as port upgrades and wet storage for offshore equipment.
“It is not just grid upgrades driving demand,” he says. “The investment across power generation, ports and other enabling infrastructure, all of that is a key driver.”
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Ireland has committed to generating 80 per cent of its electricity from renewables by 2030, up from roughly 40 per cent today. That requires building 9 gigawatts of onshore wind, 8 gigawatts of solar and 5 gigawatts of offshore wind against a current base of 5 gigawatts onshore, 2.2 gigawatts solar, and a single offshore wind farm, the Arklow Bank facility, which had a capacity of 25 megawatts when built in 2004 and is now being decommissioned.
The offshore targets in particular are in serious trouble. No project awarded in the country’s first competitive offshore auction in 2023 has yet broken ground, and the 2030 target of 5 gigawatts is now broadly acknowledged as unachievable.
O’Sullivan is direct about the cause. “The planning process often ends up in judicial reviews, which is a real impediment,” he says. “Grid and generation projects are falling foul of delays that can push them out by years or cause them to be cancelled entirely.”
His proposed remedy is to tackle community resistance before it reaches the courts: early engagement, genuine collaboration, and community benefit funds that deliver social, economic and environmental returns to local areas. “These are ways of building the trust and acceptance that projects need,” he says.
If the planning system is one brake on delivery, the workforce is the other. Research by the Technological University of the Shannon under the EU-funded Build Up Skills Ireland 2030 initiative found the construction sector will need to recruit up to 120,000 additional workers and retrain 164,000 already employed by 2030.
Electrical trades are the sharpest pressure point: a Wind Energy Ireland skills report identified a severe domestic shortage in high-voltage and direct current expertise, the precise specialisms needed to connect offshore wind to the grid.
The same report concluded domestic capacity cannot meet short-term demand and proposed relocation grants to attract Irish nationals working in the sector abroad. The economic prize on offer for closing that gap: €38 billion to the Irish economy by 2050.
The institutional response is developing. Skillnet Ireland’s Offshore Wind Academy, run with Wind Energy Ireland and backed by micro-credentials from University of Galway and UCC, is targeting mid-career switchers.
The Government’s offshore wind skills action plan maps shortfalls across 33 roles. O’Sullivan believes a new specialist construction subsector is already forming. “Companies like Sisk are looking at these opportunities and making significant investment commitments,” he says. “The work is quite specialist – highly skilled engineering and trades in the high and medium-voltage space – with a lot of technology development to align with sustainability goals.”
Ireland has built large things before under national necessity, such as the Shannon Hydroelectric Scheme, the gas network, and rural electrification itself. What distinguishes the current moment is the convergence of timelines: grid, generation and offshore construction all peaking simultaneously, competing for the same electricians and engineers in an already strained labour market.
The €14 billion approved for the grid is only the start. Planning it, staffing it and consenting it is the challenge that will determine whether Ireland’s energy ambitions are realised this decade or deferred to the next.
