Powering Prosperity – Ireland’s Offshore Wind Industrial Strategy

The Department of Enterprise, Trade & Employment recently launched Powering Prosperity - Ireland’s Offshore Wind Industrial Strategy, the first strategy of its kind for Ireland. The Strategy aims to build a successful, vibrant and impactful offshore wind energy industry in Ireland, ensuring that the sector creates as much value as possible throughout the country maximising the economic benefits associated with government ambitions to deliver its 2030, 2040 and 2050 offshore wind targets.

Powering Prosperity, which includes 40 actions that will be implemented in 2024 and 2025, was developed as part of close ongoing collaboration between the Department of Enterprise, Trade and Employment and other government departments and agencies.

This Strategy, which is focused on action in 2024 and 2025, sets out a pathway to 2030 for Ireland to become internationally recognised as a source of growing entrepreneurial companies offering innovative value propositions to the offshore wind sector both at home and overseas, as well as a high potential market for foreign direct investment (FDI) to complement our domestic capability.

Ireland has a target to generate 37GW of ORE (offshore renewable energy) by 2050 - approximately seven times our current energy demand. This fits within the context of the 260GW target by 2050 of the North Seas Energy Cooperation (NSEC) countries, of which Ireland is a member, the 300GW by 2050 target of the European Union and the 657GW global target. Ireland has the opportunity to develop an ORE sector to serve our growing domestic needs and to grow an ORE industry of a scale that can compete globally.

This Industrial Strategy was developed following intensive stakeholder consultations across Government, industry, and the research system, and is anchored on four core pillars that those consultations identified as being central to maximising the economic development potential associated with Ireland’s offshore wind ambitions.

These are:

Offshore Wind Supply Chains Research,

Development, & Innovation

Future Demand and End Uses for Renewable Energy

Balanced Regional Economic Development Opportunities

This initial iteration of the Industrial Strategy covering 2024 and 2025 includes 40 actions across these four areas. Some of the key actions that will be advanced in this iteration include:

The establishment of an Offshore Wind Centre of Excellence (OWCE) to enable offshore wind supply chain companies in Ireland, government agencies and further and higher education institutions to access, adopt and accelerate new technologies, for example, in floating offshore wind and digital, that solve real world challenges and collaborate to drive the sector’s future competitiveness

Exploring the concept of Green Energy Industrial Parks with the potential to deliver large scale, impactful property, utility and infrastructure solutions, capable of attracting larger scale investments, co-located with renewable energy generation, providing new industrial opportunities for appropriate geographical locations where complementary renewable energy can be sourced/developed, e.g., offshore and onshore wind.

Driving scale in the offshore wind supply chain through in-depth, one-to-one assistance to support transformational change in new and existing companies targeting scaled growth in the offshore wind supply chain both at home and in global markets.

A Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) between EirGrid, and Enterprise Ireland (EI), and IDA Ireland providing a framework for strategic cooperation between the parties on offshore wind development, and in particular, enabling more supply chain opportunities for companies in Ireland to get involved in the grid infrastructure projects required to support deployment of ORE.

Building on international strategic partnerships with other countries to establish meaningful cooperation in supply chain development and knowledge transfer within the highly internationalised offshore wind industry.

This Industrial Strategy will be subject to continued development, in consultation with industry and relevant Government Departments and Agencies, with this publication representing an initial set of measures targeting the immediate priority areas of supply chain development and RD&I in 2024 and 2025. The full report can be read here: powering-prosperity.pdf (enterprise.gov.ie)