Engineers Ireland - Climate action: misunderstandings, myths and the need to focus on a switch to renewables

The climate crisis has been known for decades, but efforts to tackle it have been ineffective. 2024 figures show that for Ireland, 78% of our energy comes from fossil fuels and just 22% from renewables. The graph of fossil fuel used shows continued rise to the year 2007. After that there was a drop to the year 2014 after which it plateaued.

To date, efforts to reduce fossil fuel use have concentrated on reducing demand and improving efficiency. This has not worked. We now need to change our tack to replacing fossil fuels with renewables – that’s for all energy users, not just for electricity generation.

Some of the users targeted for action are relatively low consumers of energy. The potential savings are even lower - single digit percentages. For example:

· Retrofitting homes to improve their thermal efficiency

· Changing from cars to public transport

Other uses targeted for action would in fact have a negative impact. For example:

· change over from internal combustion engines too electric vehicles

· changing home heating boilers to heat pumps

In both cases we must assume that the electricity comes from fossil fuel burning stations. The net result is that the overall CO2 emissions to the atmosphere will be greater when overall efficiencies are considered.

The bottom line is that to achieve the necessary net zero, we must replace all existing Fossil fuel users with renewables