Developing a regional energy plan for two counties in Ireland

Developing a sustainable energy supply will most likely require a transition from large-scale centralised plants to decentralised distributed generation. Consequently, local planning authorities will play a more important role in energy planning in the coming years, as more decentralised energy facilities begin to develop. In this paper, a regional energy plan is begun for two counties located on the west coast of Ireland to identify how they can reduce their overall CO2 emission by 20% by the year 2020. The two counties in question are called Limerick and Clare, which have a combined population of approximately 296,000 people over an area of approximately 6,200 km. Two primary objectives were set to create the energy plan. Firstly, an energy balance is developed here for the region based on the year 2020 using the existing consumption of energy and national energy projections. The results indicate that fossil fuels supplied over 90% of the energy in the two counties in 2009 which cost the local economy over M€300. In addition, even with the implementation of national energy efficiency and renewable energy policies, the region will still supply over 80% of its demands using fossil fuels. The energy balance here will form the basis for the second key objective, which is the creation of a new regional energy strategy using the energy-systemsanalysis tool, EnergyPLAN.