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The connection bargain — Ireland’s grid reopens the door it can’t yet walk through.
In December 2025 the Commission for Regulation of Utilities did two things within a fortnight: it set the price control that governs five years of network spending, and it reopened grid access to the large electricity users it had effectively frozen out since 2021. On paper, the framework for Ireland’s electricity grid is now settled. In the wires, it is not.
Six observations stand out: the connection door has reopened on terms the grid cannot yet honour; the money has been committed (€13.8bn at PR6); the grid is losing wind to itself (11.3% dispatch-down, a constraint story); adequacy leans on hired gas and cables to Britain and France; the two biggest unlocking projects are the furthest behind; and the 80%-by-2030 arithmetic no longer closes on the current grid.
The consequence: for the rest of this decade, value on the Irish grid is decided by location and by firmness. The winners will not be the parties with the most megawatts; they will be the parties in the right place, with the firmest position, against an import-dependent and temporarily gas-backed system.
Within a fortnight in December 2025 the CRU set the PR6 price control (€13.8bn to 2030, up from €7.6bn at PR5) and published its Large Energy User connection decision (CRU2025236), ending the de-facto Dublin freeze. A new large site above 10 MVA must now match 100% of its demand with new dispatchable generation, participate in the market, and source 80% of its power from new Irish renewables on a six-year glide path.
The grid is the connections-side of an integrated picture: it interlocks with the data-centre load that drives it (IE002), the offshore wind consented but delayed (IE003), the long-duration storage not promised until end-2028 (IE004) and the nuclear-firmed French import that Celtic brings from 2028 (IE007). A renewable target missed by 2030 may be a generation problem, an interconnection problem, or a network-delivery problem — telling them apart is the analytical task.
The shape of this volume. § 1 sets out the headline figures. § 2 develops twelve findings, each confidence-annotated. A chapter-weight pull at p. 14 anchors the argument. § 3 decodes the connection bargain — the Large Energy User reset, ECP-GSS and PR6. § 4 sets out the pipeline, the projects and interconnection. § 5 decodes curtailment, storage and the 80%-by-2030 test. § 6 sets out recommendations, with a one-page tear-out at p. 25.
The PR6 baseline for 2026–2030 is €13.8bn, rising to €18.9bn under the high-demand scenario, against €7.6bn allowed at PR5. ESB Networks takes €11.4bn (distribution); EirGrid €2.4bn (transmission). Household network charges rise about €12–21 a year; a large user’s pass-through is materially larger.
PR5 (ink) against the PR6 baseline (navy), split ESB / EirGrid; the hatched frame is the high-demand scenario. The money is settled; delivery is the test.
HIGH — anchored to a named Irish primary source (CRU, EirGrid, CSO, SEAI). MEDIUM — direction of travel confirmed but a material figure is unpublished or contested. Every forward position is labelled as a projection.
Findings 01 – 12 · summary
Findings 01 – 09 follow in detail · pp. 11 – 13 · 10 – 12 carried on the § 6 matrix
For four years, connecting a large load in Dublin was, in practice, not an option — EirGrid’s 2021 assessment and the CRU’s direction CRU/21/124 tightened the criteria to a de-facto moratorium. The Large Energy User decision of 12 December 2025 (CRU2025236) ends it, and replaces it with a demanding condition: a new site above 10 MVA must provide new dispatchable generation or storage matched to 100% of its de-rated maximum import capacity, participate in the market, and source at least 80% of its annual demand from new Irish renewables on a six-year glide path. The difficulty is timing: the renewables and network capacity to satisfy the 80% condition are years away, so the plant that meets the self-generation requirement near-term is a gas or diesel generator. Ireland has told its biggest customers to clean up and, in the same breath, made more fossil generation the fastest way to comply.
On 16 December 2025 the CRU published the PR6 final determination — the revenue control deciding what the network companies may invest and recover between 2026 and 2030. The baseline is €13.8 billion, rising to €18.9 billion under the high-demand scenario; ESB Networks takes €11.4 billion, EirGrid €2.4 billion. Against the €7.6 billion allowed at PR5, this is an increase of roughly four-fifths — the clearest signal yet that the State has accepted the scale a decarbonising, data-centre-heavy grid requires. The risk now is not funding but execution: a network business can be given €11 billion and still fail to spend it on time, on the right assets, in the right places. Domestic network charges rise about €12 a year at the baseline and €21 under the high scenario; the pass-through to a large commercial or industrial user is materially larger and belongs in every operating model.
No comparable economy carries a data-centre load this large relative to its grid. The CSO reported on 10 June 2025 that data centres used 22% of Ireland’s metered electricity in 2024 — 6,969 GWh of 31,903 GWh — up from 5% in 2015; in the Dublin region they are about half of all demand. EirGrid’s median forecast has the national share reaching 31% by 2034, with data-centre demand roughly doubling from 9.4 TWh in 2025 to 14.6 TWh. This is the demand-side pressure behind the connection reset, the emergency generation and the interconnection strategy at once. It is also why the grid question cannot be answered with a simple cap: the sector is deep, sticky foreign investment, and the same load that strains the network underwrites a large part of the tax base. The full anatomy of the sector is the subject of the companion report, IE002.