How 50 years of innovation and investment have fuelled Bord Gáis Energy – and empowered Cork
Whitegate power station, Co Cork
Bord Gáis Energy has been serving Ireland’s families and businesses for 50 years, and it all started with the discovery of gas off Kinsale, a moment that transformed Ireland’s energy landscape.
The company was set up in 1976 as Bord Gáis Éireann, a commercial semi-State charged with developing the country’s natural gas industry.
It was a remit that encouraged engineer Dave Kirwan, now country chair of Bord Gáis Energy, to join the company, in August 1999, based at Little Island.
“The Bord Gáis culture was that of a plucky organisation acting in the best interests of Ireland in a classic, semi-State public sector sense, but doing brave stuff such as bringing gas ashore from Kinsale, getting it to markets that didn’t yet exist, and delivering a customer service.”
It was a tall order for a sector in steep decline.
“It’s hard to believe now but at one point, the idea of gas as a heating fuel was dead. By the 1980s it had dropped to a low of about 80,000, largely because town gas systems had lost all credibility,” he explains.
By consolidating and revitalising them, Bord Gáis turned that story around, installing modern gas networks, encouraging people to switch to gas as a cleaner fuel and selling both gas and gas appliances.
“In doing so we utterly transformed the market. It went from 80,000 to 600,000 customers in just under a decade, and the infrastructure to underpin the resilience of the network was built in tandem, including the interconnector with the UK,” he says.
“So the level of engineering and innovation leading up to the late 1990s was the spirit of a company I wanted to join, and the spirit I wanted to maintain as I was fortunate enough to be put into a senior position to lead.”
From the first supplies of gas to local industry, to the construction of the Cork–Dublin pipeline, Bord Gáis laid the foundations of a modern and efficient energy system.
That continued on Kirwan’s watch, with the official opening of the Whitegate Combined Cycle Gas Turbine (CCGT) power station in East Cork in December 2010. The €400 million plant marked the company’s first significant move into electricity generation.
In doing so it further strengthened the country’s energy resilience.
Today Whitegate power station supplies a significant amount of Ireland’s electricity demand and forms a key part of a growing Cork Energy Hub. Bord Gáis Energy now has 1GW of energy generation in operation, including the Whitegate Power Station and a new investment in a synchronous condenser at the Whitegate Energy Park, reaffirming its commitment to Cork and its vital role in the national energy system.
“We now view our power station in Whitegate as a strategic asset and not just a power station,” says Kirwan.
“We see it as a hub for an energy centre of the future, which could encompass electrolysing offshore wind for hydrogen use, storing it in Kinsale, for consumption in a power station that delivers 10 per cent of Ireland’s demand.”
Bord Gáis Energy is also investing in future-focused system solutions. Its Kestrel Project, run in partnership with ESB and dCarbonX, will repurpose the decommissioned Kinsale gas fields into a long duration energy storage resource.
“The wider ecosystem that we can develop, alongside partners in the area, could make Cork an epicentre for a decarbonised energy park, which is very hard to replicate but which the national infrastructure in Cork Harbour has given us an opportunity to exploit,” he adds.
“We are very passionate about this because, bear in mind, the story of Bord Gáis began in Kinsale. I would love if the arc of the story brought us back to that same place and that, from there, we can become an exemplar for the world class decarbonisation of an energy centre, situated in the very area that gave birth to the company.”
Back in 2014 however, as part of the EU-IMF bailout requirements that followed the financial crisis, Bord Gáis Eireann’s retail, trading and Whitegate power generation division was sold to international energy company Centrica.
It was a period Kirwan will never forget, not least because he had “misgivings”, he admits.
“I had been, man and boy, in semi-States. I had started with ESB and ended up in Bord Gáis, and we had done amazing things in the model we were asked to operate in. I wondered at the time, because of the circumstances that led to it, if it would it be good for the business,” he says.
His job, as managing director Bord Gáis Energy, was to run the business through the sale, which he did until 2018.
As it happened, being part of the publicly traded energy company was a “new dawn” for the company, he says, coming with a commitment to invest €1 billion in critical infrastructure, innovation and customer solutions, by 2027.
After two years at senior leadership level with Centrica in the UK, Kirwan returned to Ireland to head up Bord Gáis Energy once more in 2020, “with a determination to be relevant in net zero,” he says.
More innovation followed, including a partnership with the Irish Farmers Association (IFA).
“We said to the IFA let us be the supplier of choice for solar installations and we will help to decarbonise farms across the country,” he explains.
Solar has since eclipsed its boiler services business. The company also innovated in relation to talent, investing in apprenticeship programmes to ensure it has the engineers it needs for renewable technologies. It launched a One Stop Shop, undertaking home retrofits, and continued to invest in physical infrastructure.
“We’re developing flexible gas fired generators that help the intermittency of renewables, at efficiencies never achieved before. We’re bringing batteries to the Irish market and people like me are now sticking our head above the parapet and asking if Ireland should consider next generation nuclear as a way of decarbonising and supporting data centre growth,” he explains.
In doing so he is drawing on the company’s 50-year legacy of addressing big infrastructural issues head on.
“There is now a global competition among countries to host data centre infrastructure for AI, in order to have digital sovereignty and to create economic hubs of growth. If we are not brave enough it will be a story of missed opportunity that we will have to tell our grandchildren.”
However Kirwan, who has a doctorate in business administration from UCC, sees enormous potential if we get it right, both for Cork and for the country.
“I am an optimist, always have been. People can look at the demand and urgency for energy transformation - because we have an amazing economy and an amazing thirst for energy - as a problem,” he says.
“But I see it as an opportunity - to try new things, to innovate, to attract great capital and to attract great talent into the energy sector.”
