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Email us →Both countries are greening their electricity faster than at any point on record — wind is Britain's largest source, Ireland's renewable share has never been higher. Neither is close to energy independence. Britain still lets gas set the power price almost every hour of the day; Ireland still brings nearly nine-tenths of its gas through a single entry point in Scotland. This is the honest picture of both: what the mix is now, where it comes from, and what stands between here and independence.
● Figures sourced · DUKES 2025 · NESO 2025 review · SEAI Energy in Ireland 2025 · GNI Winter Outlook 2025/26 · CSO · point-in-time · verified 2026-07-27 · re-verified on each country's annual statistical cycle (DUKES July · SEAI ~November · GNI winter outlook)
Britain's figures are the 2025 calendar year. Ireland's latest complete year is 2024. They are not the same year and we do not present them as one.
Wind led for the second year running at 29.7% of electricity; gas second at 26.8%; renewables together 44% — a record 127 TWh, three times the output of 2015. 2025 was the first calendar year in history with zero coal on the grid, and for half an hour on 1 April, zero-carbon sources touched 97.7% of supply.
Source · NESO, Britain's Energy Explained: 2025 review
Gas led at 41.8% of gross electricity supply; wind delivered 32.1%; net imports over the interconnectors 13.9%. Fossil generation fell to 45.3%, the lowest on record, and the renewable electricity share reached 41.3%, the highest yet.
Source · SEAI, Energy in Ireland 2025
The readBritain's electricity is majority-renewable and gas is losing ground. Ireland's is still gas-led, with wind closing. Both directions are right. Neither base has changed yet.
Power, heat and transport together are where dependence actually shows.
43.8% net import dependency in 2024, up 3.4 points in a year. UK energy production fell to a record low; North Sea oil and gas output now sits 75% below its 1999 peak, and the regulator projects gas production falling ~95% by 2050 with or without new licences. Over 90% of energy imports are oil and gas — gas mostly from Norway, oil mostly from the US. And the price link remains: gas sets the GB electricity price roughly 97% of the time, the highest share in Europe.
68.6% of all energy imported in 2024. Oil alone is 48.9% of primary energy — the cars, the trucks, the heating. The gas is the sharper story: 85.7% of the Republic's gas arrives through the Moffat entry point in Scotland, and the one domestic field, Corrib, is declining fast — its winter supply capacity fell 15.6% in a single year. Demand is rising to meet it: data centres consumed 23% of Ireland's electricity in 2025, up from 22% the year before.
SEAI's own verdict: “we haven't broken the link between economic development and fossil fuels in a structural, meaningful way yet.”
The readBritain's exposure is a price problem — it has the molecules, it just pays a gas-set price for the electrons. Ireland's is a route problem — one pipeline, one entry point, a declining field behind it.
Sources · DUKES 2025 Ch.1 · NSTA projections · ECIU analysis · SEAI · Gas Networks Ireland Winter Outlook 2025/26 · CSO
“Energy independence” doesn't mean autarky — it means replacing imported molecules with home-built electrons: wind, solar, nuclear and storage built here, moving on a grid built here. Every 1% the renewables share rises is fuel the UK no longer buys.
For an island at the end of every pipeline, independence means renewable generation at scale — offshore wind above all — the grid to move it, and the interconnection to trade it: Celtic to France, Greenlink and EWIC to Britain.
And every project in both sentences is on the board now.
1,066 live projects · £475bn of build-out, tracked
The mix is the reason the build-out exists.
Open the live map →Only one differs — and the difference tells you what each country is actually short of.
Connection queues and transmission build lag generation ambition on both sides. In Britain the wires are now the bottleneck, which is why the network build-out is the largest in generations. In Ireland the island grid and its connection process are being reformed on both sides of the border.
The direction is published years before the diggers move — the consents themselves are the early signal. Both jurisdictions are reforming the system.
The workforce gap has its own board. Ireland alone needs ~80,000 extra workers by 2030 on ESRI's estimate.
Source · ESRI estimate (pack-verified)
Turbines, cables and HVDC converter capacity are globally booked; every delivery date on the calendar depends on them.
The staging space offshore wind needs — scarce, and on every developer's critical path.
Since leaving the EU's internal energy market, the UK runs its own regime: an independent UK Emissions Trading Scheme, its own renewables auctions (Contracts for Difference — AR7 alone put 14.7GW under contract), its own market-reform programme, and interconnector trading with the EU that is no longer automatically coupled, a standing efficiency cost both sides acknowledge.
An EU member inside the internal energy market: the EU ETS prices its carbon, RED III sets its renewables obligation — a 2030 target of 43% of overall energy against 2024's 16.1%, and the distance is the story — and EU market coupling governs its interconnector trade.
The readBritain's direction is sovereign; the physics, and much of the fuel, is still shared with the continent it decoupled from. Ireland's direction is set in Brussels; its gas still comes through Scotland.
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