At the biggest energy conference of the year, no one is talking about decarbonization or net zero. It's all data centers now.
Almost makes you wonder how deep the commitment to decarbonization really ran in the first place!
In our first joint post, @aislinnn.bsky.social and I explore how a national biosphere for Ireland offers a chance to reverse a legacy of extractive land use – not as nostalgia and not as bureaucratic compliance, but as a collective act of repair. substack.com/home/post/p-...
Flood prevention is not the only, or even the most important, benefit of nature restoration, but it's helpful if nothing else to show how repairing nature is a solution, not a luxury or an imposition.
People genuinely think that "off-grid" means it's powered by on-site renewables only. Madness.
The company itself claims it's "carbon neutral" because it has entered into biogas purchase agreements *abroad*.
Genuinely sustainable fuels are always going to be scarce and need to be saved for aviation and maybe long duration strategic storage.
I think we need to defend the mission to make buildings energy efficient and powered by indigenous energy with heat pumps and district heating networks. Transport also needs to be made efficient and electrified ASAP.
www.irishtimes.com/opinion/2026...
I've been calling attention to this for a few years now in my Irish Times column, firstly in 2023. The red flags have only gotten larger since then, but policy support for HVO is still a live topic.
hannahdaly.ie/2023-06-02-r...
Irish oil lobbyists have been pushing for more liquid "biofuels" despite this massive problem, and it's even been assessed as an alternative to retrofitting homes by an influential ESRI report.
How simple it is to pass pure palm oil off as "used cooking oil", then infiltrating the European biofuel market! Fossil fuels simply can't be replaced at scale by waste product shipped from another continent. That it comes from areas suffering devastating deforestation is an unforgivable red flag
[To absolutely nobody's surprise ... biofuel supply lines are "rife with fraud". Take note @esri.ie ?]
Crossed social media platforms and did an Instagram Live session about our new BSc Sustainability, starting in UCC this September
www.instagram.com/reel/DWPWOkS...
The US government has agreed to pay TotalEnergies $928 million to cancel its offshore wind leases and redirect the money to oil and gas instead.
This is happening during the worst global energy crisis (per IEA) in history and as rising prices put huge pressure on households and businesses.
Its become weirdly uncool to say so, but when you drive a gas car, you ride with Putin and the mullahs and Big Oil. www.nytimes.com/2026/03/23/o...
I somehow prefer “AI factories” to “digital infrastructure” though, which is what everyone up to our Prime Minister is calling it here.
He stopped them from connecting to the gas network, which IMO is their main threat. there was a moratorium through his whole time as minister, no? Now it‘s open season.
L’Irlande, qui veut devenir le leader européen des data centers, est victime de son succès
archive.is/2026.03.21-1...
“Data centers have driven requests to triple the company’s peak capacity” 🤯
(in Ireland, the figure is “only” double)
Don’t threaten me with a good time
Whoa.
Any idea why the oil at solar peak?
A question for the international lawyers: does the US energy blockade of Cuba count as a war crime, given the indiscriminate civilian suffering?
www.theguardian.com/world/2026/m...
A stacked area chart of the renewable electricity generation mix on the island of Ireland with the following fuel types: battery, biomass, waste-to-energy, hydro, solar, wind, oil, and gas. The y axis indicates the percentage of demand being met by each source. Footnote reads: All-island figures. Excludes rooftop solar. Source: EirGrid, SEMO
A treemap of the electricity mix on the island of Ireland with the following fuel types: battery, biomass, hydro, solar, wind, oil, gas, and waste-to-energy. Larger sources are annotated with the GWh and percentage of total generation that source comprised. Footnote reads: All-island figures. Excludes rooftop solar. Source: EirGrid, SEMO
Earlier this month, output from solar farms started exceeding 1GW for the first time.
Yesterday, we saw another important record set: around 1pm, solar output was equal to almost a quarter of the island's electricity demand.
☀️ 🔋
Ah, I heard incorrectly.
Fossil fuels push the world towards autocracy. Were we less dependent on them, there might have been no President Trump, no President Putin, no ayatollahs, no Netanyahu, no perpetual Middle East wars. Democracy depends on unhooking ourselves.
This week's column.
www.theguardian.com/commentisfre...
It’s quite mild compared with some of the hate mail in my inbox after that op-ed! Somehow it’s the nuclear advocates who hate my message the most 🤷♀️
Can someone wake me up from this nightmare?
🗞️ ✨ New paper, led by Tara Kenny, examines the Dublin Declaration (DD).
We find many authors of the DD are connected via livestock industry networks, largely from high-income countries, with notable levels of self-citation across the literature.
link.springer.com/article/10.1...
This DC alone would increase Ireland's fossil gas demand by about 4%. There are multiple projects like this in development here, some of which are several times this size.
