How Brexit’s fallout doomed climate action in Northern Ireland

ANTRIM HILLS, Northern Ireland — Nestled away in Northern Ireland’s sprawling Antrim Hills, a wind turbine towers over a beef farm. Its sweeping blades generate all the energy the farm needs, and send excess electricity back to the power grid, where it is zipped across the country.

The turbine belongs to a local farmer, John Watt. It was inspired, he says, by his father, who hooked a water wheel up to a generator to produce energy for the farm back in the 1950s. “He always wanted a wind turbine. He thought it would be a great thing, because we lived up on a very naturally windy area, to produce your own electricity,” Watt said.

That dream, finally, is a reality.

But getting clean energy up and running in Northern Ireland — after years of damaging Brexit-related gridlock in this part of the U.K. — is an uphill struggle. Even with elections in Westminster just two weeks away, and a change of U.K. government looking increasingly likely, few in Northern Ireland are expecting real progress soon.

Watt applied to erect his turbine in 2011 but it didn’t start spinning for another seven years, held up by planning delays, environmental surveys, and the wait to secure a coveted connection to the grid. The local network company refused to let him export as much power off the farm as he wanted. The grid connection alone set him back £70,000.

Northern Ireland’s political leaders in the Stormont Assembly have lofty ambitions for bringing more and more clean energy like wind power online — but the experience in Antrim Hills, of delays and high costs, helps illustrate why these ambitions are set to fail.

Stormont wants to generate 80 percent of all electricity from renewables by 2030. The current U.K.-wide goal is to then hit 100 percent by 2035 — or even earlier if, as expected, Labour sweeps to power in Westminster in a few weeks’ time.

But Northern Ireland is going backwards. Even as energy generation from renewables rose in the U.K. as a whole last year, it actually fell in the country, according to official data, to 45.5 percent.

Clean energy efforts are battling an “unsupportive policy environment” and “disjointed” planning rules, a parliamentary inquiry found earlier this year. And above all, a deeply dysfunctional political set up.

‘Crushed’ by Stormont’s collapse 

One central problem: Stormont itself. 

The chambers responsible for green policies lay empty between 2022 and 2024, after the Democratic Unionist Party (DUP) collapsed local government in a row over post-Brexit trading rules. Stormont was also shuttered for three years between 2017 and 2020. New ministers only took up their posts this February — and now have a mountain of delayed plans to work through.

“It is an example of what happens when you stop government, and start it, and stop it, and start it,” said Claire Hanna, the Social Democratic & Labour Party candidate for South Belfast, who was a member of the U.K. parliament’s Northern Ireland Affairs Committee before the election was called. “It means that you're always just recovering from the last collapse … Public services, the environment, all that stuff is always what gets crushed by the Assembly collapsing.”

Stormont’s leaders have already missed immediate deadlines for improving net zero policy. A Climate Action Plan, setting out how Northern Ireland would hit its carbon budgets, was supposed to be drawn up before the end of 2023. But Stormont did not sit at all last year and it still isn’t clear when that plan will be published.

The U.K. government’s independent climate advisors, the Climate Change Committee, have warned that, even with “radical actions,” Northern Ireland will not reach net zero carbon emissions by 2050, a U.K.-wide, legally binding goal. Getting there requires ambitious new policies, but so far there has been no evidence of the “scale” needed, the CCC said.

Stormont's ministers put a brave face on work to hit those goals — but are candid that the political collapse has created real trouble.

Stormont closing has “had a real impact upon society here in Northern Ireland, and particularly in relation to our efforts in terms of tackling climate change in Northern Ireland,” admitted the Alliance Party’s Andrew Muir, who as minister for agriculture, environment and rural affairs is tasked with setting the region’s carbon budgets. 

“[I’m] very conscious that, [as] I'm talking to you, I'm talking about a climate action plan that has started in the past, which is reflective of what's happened here in terms of the collapse of government,” he added. 

Across the Executive table, Sinn Fein Economy Minister Conor Murphy, who is responsible for drawing in the billions of pounds of investment needed to reach net zero, acknowledged that two years without a functioning government has made it harder to attract that capital.

“We didn’t have a direct replacement decision-making framework [for when Stormont was shuttered],” Murphy said. “Not only does that gum up your decision making capacity but also, in terms of the necessary involvement of the private sector … they want a degree of political certainty to jump into the game and to be involved and to recognise [that] things will happen in a reasonable timeframe.

“There’s no doubt that the absence of an Executive has slowed that up.”

Industry figures are still talking up the region’s green potential — but expect it to miss its shorter-term target. “The trajectory is right. I think Northern Ireland will get there. Is it achievable by 2030? I don't think so,” said TJ Hunter, senior director of development at Ørsted, the developer behind Ballykeel wind farm, which sits just a short drive away from Watt’s farm.

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Stephen Agnew, boss of the clean energy trade group RenewableNI, agrees that something has to change. He warned MPs back in January that Westminster would need to step in if Stormont remained closed, or “we will fail not only Northern Ireland’s targets but the U.K.’s wider target for zero-carbon electricity.”

Now that ministers are finally back at their desks in Belfast, collaboration across politics and industry is essential, said Jim Shannon, a DUP candidate in the U.K. election and another former member of the Northern Ireland Committee.

“One leg of the stool can’t stand on its own, two would be a bit of a challenge, three is what you need … We need Westminster, we need the Northern Ireland Assembly, [and] we need private enterprise. And then, together, we can achieve this,” he said.

Northern Ireland must double its renewable capacity in the next five years to hit its 2030 goal, according to evidence submitted to the Northern Ireland Affairs Committee. But without changes to planning rules in particular, developers say they will simply struggle to get projects off the ground. Those delays, as well as the absence of any market support scheme for developers, leaves Northern Ireland unattractive to potential investors, they argue.

“We look at Northern Ireland and say: it could be great, but it's not great,” said Mark Ennis, chair of the energy company SSE Ireland. One proposed wind farm took six years to get through the planning process, he said, at a cost of £2 million — only to get turned down based on arguments about its impact on the landscape.

Northern Ireland’s policy framework was set in 2015. It is being reviewed, but in the meantime it takes no account of net zero targets set under the Climate Change Act in 2022, legislation passed just as Stormont’s institutions were paralyzed.

“Our planning system is not fit for purpose,” Ennis said. “It just doesn't even consider that there's a climate crisis.” Northern Ireland lags way behind its neighbors on getting consent for new green projects. It took 1,136 days on average to grant planning for an onshore wind farm in the region, compared to 730 in Great Britain and just 413 days in the Republic of Ireland, according to RenewableNI data covering 2020 to 2023.

Investment flowing east and south

The policy vacuum doesn’t stop at planning.

Since 2014, green firms in England, Scotland and Wales have been able to bid for projects under Whitehall’s flagship Contracts for Difference (CfD) scheme, which guarantees long-term payments to developers of clean energy like wind farms and solar power. The latest auction round, currently underway, is underwritten with almost £1 billion from the U.K. Treasury.

Stormont is consulting on designing a similar scheme — but whenever Shannon has pushed for extending the Great Britain CfD to Northern Ireland, ministers have shot it down. The idea was not “feasible,” former Energy Minister Graham Stuart told Shannon in parliament back in October.

As a result, investment is flowing east to Great Britain and south to Ireland, where more attractive opportunities lie. 

“We're seeing huge investment in Scotland, we're seeing huge investment in the Republic of Ireland. The only thing different about Northern Ireland is policy,” said RenewableNI’s Agnew. “The wind conditions are at least as good. The sites are there. The global investment is there to invest in these projects. The thing that's lacking is policy.”

Statutory powers are also two decades out of date. Northern Ireland’s Utility Regulator — unlike its GB equivalent, Ofgem, which has a statutory duty to support Britain’s net zero target — has no powers to support climate goals.

And there are around 100 megawatts of wind projects — more than all the renewables power the region has connected in the last five years — sitting undeveloped in the pipeline because the EU and U.K. have diverged on the trade of green electricity over the Irish border. Clean energy developers on both sides of the border are still waiting for a policy solution, which will need to be brokered by Belfast and the EU.

No time to lose

U.K.-wide goals set in Westminster, like net zero by 2050 or clean energy by 2035, mean no part of the kingdom can straggle behind the rest. It is a problem that Labour — which reckons it can hit clean energy as early as 2030 — looks set to inherit after the general election.

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Labour did not reply to POLITICO’s repeated questions on what they would do about green policy failures in Northern Ireland.

But there are some indications they are at least aware of the problem. The party has flagged ambitious schemes in Northern Ireland, including a pledge to build “hundreds” of small-scale power projects and to invest in upgrading Belfast Harbour, which is essential for bringing in and maintaining turbines for offshore wind.

Some in Whitehall think an incoming Labour government will grip the issue more than their Conservative predecessors, driven by a greater focus on devolution. Labour ministers are more likely “to target areas [of the U.K.] that are maybe struggling more than others” to get clean energy projects off the ground, said one former official from the Department for Energy Security and Net Zero, granted anonymity to speak candidly.

For now, though, Labour leader Keir Starmer and Shadow Energy Secretary Ed Miliband have no plans to visit the region this side of the election to talk up clean energy, as they have with other devolved countries, according to a Labour official familiar with Starmer and Miliband's plans.

In the meantime, away from the hurly-burly of Westminster and Stormont, warning signs about Northern Ireland’s failure to move fast enough on bringing down emissions and tackling climate change are hard to miss. 

When temperatures spiked last summer, Lough Neagh, the largest freshwater lake in the U.K., was blanketed in toxic blue-green algae. The algae — caused by a mixture of runoff from farmland, extreme weather and climate change — pushes eels to the bottom of the lake to ride out the storm, where they are impossible for local fishermen to catch. There are already signs the algae is beginning to return this summer. 

“To say it was really bad is an understatement,” said Gary McErlain, who has been fishing on the Lough since he was 14. “At one point in early September, the River Bann [which flows into Lough Neagh] was literally running green, like you’d see on Saint Patrick's Day.”

Moves are afoot in Stormont to force the Executive to act on Lough Neagh before it is too late. But that process only began last month.

McErlain’s wife, Anne-Marie, a teacher, writes poems about the Lough. Since the algae bloomed, she has found it harder to pick up her pen. “I have bits of a poem in my head about the algae and I haven't allowed myself to write that one down,” she said. “I just think it would depress me too much.”

Additional reporting by Russell Hargrave.