With all the news of Ireland’s bombardment with wind and rain in 2015, it’s perhaps not surprising that it was enough to see us rise to third in the world rankings of countries that used wind energy to generate electricity.
Wind energy in Ireland has always been seen as our greatest hope in trying to achieve our target of 16pc of Ireland’s energy being generated by renewables by 2020 given, well, our abundance of wind.
And now, according to the Irish Wind Energy Association (IWEA), which has gotten its hands on preliminary figures from a report by the International Energy Agency (IEA), Ireland will soon move up one place in the world wind energy usage rankings to third spot, overtaking Spain.
According to these figures, 24pc of Ireland’s entire electricity usage was met by indigenous wind energy, with the rough weather in December seeing a record 39pc of Ireland’s demands being met by wind energy for that month.
In 2014, Ireland was ranked in fourth place behind Spain’s 20.4pc at just 18.3pc, but still quite far behind Denmark’s 39.1pc.