EirGrid has won a prestigious award for its work on the Shaping Our Electricity Future energy roadmap at the Third PCI Energy Days conference which took place in Brussels last month. EirGrid chief executive Mark Foley accepted the Good Practice of the Year Award from the Renewables Grid Initiative (RGI), a pan-European consortium of NGOs and electricity transmission system operators.
RGI members are involved in an “energy transition ecosystem-of-actors”. The initiative seeks to promote fair, transparent, sustainable grid development to enable the growth of renewables to achieve full decarbonisation in line with the Paris Agreement.
A jury of experts selected EirGrid for the Communication and Engagement prize, one of three award categories. The award recognises practices that enable grid developers and stakeholders to work closer together for mutual benefit.
RGI said it selected Shaping Our Electricity Future because “it is this type of strategic outreach that can help bring citizens on board for a wider energy conversation and reach the underlying objective of fighting climate change”.
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The jury, which included Marie Donnelly, chairperson of the Climate Change Advisory Council Ireland, commended EirGrid for using “a range of innovative, participatory approaches in their consultation. They asked for views from the public, industry, and civil society on their four approaches to achieving Ireland’s renewable ambitions.”
EirGrid has twice previously won the RGI Communication and Engagement award, most recently in 2020 for its engagement on the Celtic Interconnector project. The organisation was initially shortlisted for this year’s prize along with a number of outstanding international projects. These included the Digital Citizen Information Market by German electricity transmission operator Amprion. This is a 3D virtual space to present information about grid development projects to stakeholders and the public; and TransMit by UK-based BirdLife International, an interactive toolkit which aims to help those involved in planning, installing, and maintaining grid infrastructure to choose the best measures to minimise avian collisions and electrocutions.
The roadmap was the result of a comprehensive 14-week consultation across all sectors of society. This comprised a series of workshops, meetings and forums across the country to inform people and gather feedback that directly influenced the final roadmap.
The consultation was supported by a range of traditional and innovative engagement and participation activities. These included a Deliberative Dialogue (modelled on Ireland’s Citizens’ Assembly), complemented by national forums involving industry, civil society and youth.
In addition to this EirGrid engaged at grassroots level holding more than 100 events engaging with civil society organisations, communities, local businesses, industry, consumers, agricultural groups and young people, and 572 submissions were received as part of the consultation. Evaluation showed very positive feedback from participants and the media.
Mark Foley explains that the commitment to decarbonise is at the heart of the Shaping Our Electricity Future roadmap. Ireland has a target to ensure that up to 80 per cent of its electricity comes from renewable sources by the year 2030. EirGrid, which operates the national electricity grid, set out four different approaches to ensuring that ambition could be achieved, and that the projected increases in demand over that time period can be met. These approaches are contained in Shaping Our Electricity Future.
The consultation and engagement programme was aimed at achieving a number of different objectives including to gain an understanding of stakeholder views on and preferences for the four approaches. That encompassed the factors that influence those views, including underlying assumptions, risk profiles for the proposals, and trade-offs that stakeholders make in gauging their preferences.
The engagement activities were designed to answer four key research questions. What stakeholders think about the proposals for each workstream; which proposals do they prefer, and why; the conditionality of their views; and the values, motivators, and messaging that influence their views.
EirGrid has taken learnings from the process and incorporated them into day-to-day grid development project consultation, engagement and communication as well as the strategic development of the company, according to Foley. This can be seen across a wide range of major EirGrid infrastructure projects currently under way. These include the Kildare Meath Grid Upgrade, the East Meath North Dublin Project, the Powering Up Dublin Project and the Celtic Interconnector Project.
“The collaborative consultation process undertaken to support Shaping Our Electricity Future was the most extensive we have ever used in Ireland,” he adds. “The centrepiece of the consultation was the use of a citizens’ assembly to get the true and honest voice of Irish citizens on electricity grid options open to us as the transmission system operator. Those citizens, and the many organisations we partnered with, have helped us to bring forward a realistic – and realisable – grid development strategy that will enable Ireland to decarbonise while securing our electricity supply.”