Spending on gas for electricity in Ireland was cut by almost €1 billion last year, as wind energy supplied 32% of Ireland's electricity.
Irish wind farms saved €748mon gas, which would have been predominantly imported, and a further €268m in carbon credits in Ireland.
An additional €213m was saved on gas and carbon credits in Northern Ireland, bringing total all-island savings to more than €1.2 billion.
These figures come from the latest annual Cutting Carbon, Cutting Bills report from Baringa, which analyses the annual savings in gas consumption delivered by wind energy.
Electricity savings were particularly high in March, the strongest month for wind energy generation last year, and December, the month with the highest gas prices.
However, Noel Cunniffe CEO of Wind Energy Ireland, said last year was a milestone year for Ireland's wind energy.
However, he also said further savings were prevented due to insufficient grid capacity which meant Ireland was unable to take full advantage of its windiest months.
We need your consent to load this rte-player contentWe use rte-player to manage extra content that can set cookies on your device and collect data about your activity. Please review their details and accept them to load the content.Manage Preferences
"We crossed the milestone of 5000 megawatts of onshore wind generation capacity installed as we make our way towards 9000 megawatts, which is our 2030 target," said Mr Cunniffe.
"But it was also the worst year on record for the amount of wind power that we lost because the grid could not take all of that wind power at certain points in time," he said.
"When a wind turbine is shut down because the grid can't take the electricity, it means higher bills, it means more carbon emissions, so reinforcing our electricity grid to allow us to have a more resilient supply of power, but also a sustainable and clean supply of power is is absolutely vital," he added.
Mr Cunniffe said he welcomed the announcement last week by Minister Darragh O'Brien of new government plans to strengthen the electricity grid.
He said that would help protect families and businesses that are vulnerable to the weather events that we saw very recently, but that reinforcement of the electricity grid would also help the country to utilise Ireland's renewable energy fleet to its maximum efficiency.
Last year there was a third annual update to the Climate Action Plan (CAP2024).
The Plan provides a roadmap for taking decisive action to halve Ireland’s emissions by 2030 and reach net zero by no later than 2050.
Mr Cunniffe said from an electricity system standpoint, Ireland is not on track to meet those targets.
"There's two things I would point out; one is the reinforcement of the grid as I mentioned, we need to do that if we're to be able to use all the renewable energy that we're generating from wind farms, from solar farms and move it to homes and businesses across the country, so reinforcing that is critical," he said.
"The second element of that is we need to resource up our planning system so that we can get renewable energy projects, grid infrastructure projects, and more generally just climate change projects through the planning system at a more efficient rate than we currently are.
"We're simply going too slow to hit our 2030 targets at the moment, but if we do resource that up, especially with the new legislation coming forward in the new planning and Development Act, then we do have a chance of hitting our targets, but only if there's a concerted effort by the government in the coming 12 months," he added.
