Fine Gael MEP Seán Kelly’s proposals to accelerate renewable energy projects

Fit for 55: Fast-tracking public renewable energy projects

Fine Gael MEP for Ireland South, Seán Kelly, speaks to eolas about his proposals under the EU’s Fit for 55 initiative to remove obstacles to planning and permitting in order to accelerate the development of public renewable energy projects.

“We cannot achieve our Green Deal targets without a massive expansion of renewable energy,” Kelly says. “We have the capability to thrive in climate neutral Europe, but this will take a widespread uptake from all stakeholders, backed by government and society more broadly.”

As Kelly emphasises, wind and solar power are both intermittent, meaning that Ireland must plan to replace its fossil fuel-based backup system with battery storage and demand response as well as utilising the energy storage of molecules such as hydrogen that are produced with renewable energy. However, “we also cannot hide from the fact” that there will still be “a role to play for transitional fuels until then”. The speed with which that transition can be conducted is currently constrained, Kelly argues, and the Kerry native states that this must be addressed.

energy system; we do not have time for this process to be tainted by ideology,” he says, insisting: “The reality is that if we are able to be successful in this transition, we must fast-track the removal of planning or marketbased obstacles to ensure rapid delivery of renewable energy technologies. Permitting and licensing procedures remain one of the biggest hurdles in achieving mass deployment of renewable technologies. Procedures for granting permits differ in member

states, and with more cross-border cooperation on energy projects, we are likely to see more and more unnecessary time wasted on getting the required bureaucracy in order.”

While Kelly speaks in general terms about Europe, he emphasises the need for reform in Ireland, where his own party is currently in government with both Fianna Fáil and the Green Party: “There is a serious need for Ireland to change its regulatory and planning system. Although action is being taken, we are not moving quickly enough to develop offshore wind projects needed to meet targets in the Government’s Climate Action Plan. This leads to a lack of confidence in industry and the supply chain, and it must be urgently addressed.

“Beyond the regulatory framework, more resources need to be allocated to planning authorities so they can speed up applications for positive energy projects. This situation is not unique to Ireland and to put it bluntly, if we collectively do not address permitting and planning, then we are doomed to fail the next generation.”

In July 2021, the European Commission unveiled its Fit for 55 legislation package, aimed at supporting the delivery of a 55 per cent reduction in greenhouse gas emissions by 2030. The package contains legislative proposals to align climate, energy, and transport policies across the European Union. These include: the application of emissions trading to new sectors and a tightening of the existing EU Emissions Trading System; the increased use of renewable energy and greater energy efficiency; a faster rollout of low emission transport modes and the infrastructure and fuels to support them; an alignment of taxation policies with the European Green Deal objectives; and measures to prevent carbon leakage and tools to preserve and grow our natural carbon sinks.

Under these principles, Kelly is proposing the introduction of a new label on public interest renewable projects “that will allow the granting of priority status in national law”. “This new project status should ensure a prioritisation by the competent authority and the streamlining of processes and procedures,” he says.

“The label would effectively guarantee that necessary, positive renewable energy projects will receive far quicker licensing and planning authorisation. Each member state should carry out strategic plans detailing how they will adapt their permit system to ensure that they will reach their commitments under the energy and

climate plans. This, I believe, should be done via the Renewable Energy Directive Article 15 and 16. I am currently in discussion concerning this within the European People’s Party group, and I have been encouraged by their reaction to my proposals.”

Kelly makes a macro-observation before delivering his conclusion, reflecting on how the Earth has seen these energy transitions before, from the use of coal emerging during the Industrial Revolution and crude oil following the first World War, and must act now to address the great challenge of this generation. “Instead of an evolution of energy sources that are more efficient in terms of energy output, we now have to redesign our fuel and electricity systems so that we can maintain societal and economic order while staying within our planetary boundaries,” he says.

“Combined with the short time we have to make this fundamental switch; this energy transition is certainly unique, and the task cannot be overstated. It is clear that addressing climate change will be pivotal to the future growth of our economies as the cost of inaction now will be far exceeded by the cost involved with adaptation, never mind the societal and political instability this would create.”

Concluding, he calls on the European Commission to oversee this process and ensure member states are fulfilling their duties to make Europe fit for 55: “Member states should report to the Commission based on key performance indicators [KPIs], including whether or not planning authorities are adequately resourced. The Commission should publish these indicators together with an assessment and recommendations, ranking the different approaches taken, and take every effort to encourage member states to achieve higher scores in terms of KPIs.

“We have the technology, the expertise and the capacity; there are many technical problems to face but we really do not have any excuse to have a permitting and licensing system that slows needed progress.”

“There is a serious need for Ireland to change its regulatory and planning system. Although action is being taken, we are not moving quickly enough to develop offshore wind projects needed to meet targets in the Government’s Climate Action Plan.” environment and climate report

Harnessing the potential of AI to enable more powerful processing and analysis of earth observation data

Artificial intelligence (AI) modelling is only possible with large amounts of quality data. ‘Garbage in, garbage out’ is an often-quoted tru-ism in this field, reflecting that AI models need to be trained using large volumes of data, but also that this data must be quality controlled, preprocessed and mathematically manipulated to achieve the desired performance from the model, writes Jenny Hanafin, Earth Observation Activity Lead at ICHEC.

This process requires both human and computational effort and creating training data is usually the most costly part of an AI exercise. So, training datasets (TDS) are a valuable resource but sharing them openly is not straightforward.

With the arrival of New Space, the cost of putting satellites into space has come down by orders of magnitude, resulting in a flurry of new satellites in orbit and an exponential increase in the volume of data available. With such large volumes of earth observation (EO) data now available, AI is becoming necessary to carry out processing and analysis to glean insights. The lack of training datasets is becoming a major bottleneck in more widespread and systematic use of machine learning in EO, however. The aim of the AIREO project was to provide resources to standardise aspects of TDS, along with tools to allow data creators to share their data so that users can use it appropriately. One major issue is a knowledge gap between AI practitioners (TDS users, usually IT specialists) and EO experts (TDS creators, usually scientists or data scientists). The users often do not have experience with essential concepts such as map projections, file formats, calibration, and quality assurance. Other issues include: a lack of, or inaccessibility of, high-quality TDS; absence of standards resulting in inconsistent and heterogeneous TDS; limited discoverability and interoperability of TDS; and lack of bestpractices and guidelines for generating, structuring and describing TDS. To address these some basic principles were established: TDS should be selfexplanatory; TDS should be shared following FAIR principles; TDS should be published in a form ready for use in AI/ML applications. Based on these principles, a set of specifications and best practice guidelines for data creators and users was produced, along with a python library and some sample datasets to help users to apply the recommendations.

Partners

The AIREO activity is led by the Irish Centre for High-End Computing at National University of Ireland, Galway, in collaboration with Ireland’s Centre for Applied AI (CeADAR) at University College Dublin and is funded by the European Space Agency (ESA) Phi-Lab. ICHEC is the Irish national centre for high-performance computing and hosts the Irish archive of ESA data.

Community driven

One of the keys for success in this project was engagement with expert community members to identify how to develop the resources to fulfil the needs of both data creators and users. More than 100 experts across the globe have provided input through the AIREO

network. They have had access to all up-to-date material released by the project and have helped with workshops, one-to-one consultations and surveys organised by the project to give feedback and provide direction for further work.res to establish how FAIR the data is.

Documentation and metadata specification

The specifications and guidelines were developed using FAIR principles which stipulate that data should be findable, accessible, interoperable, and reusable. In order to make training data sets (TDS) more reusable, one of the aims of the specification was to standardise the metadata included with an AIREO TDS. The specification also establishes different levels of required, recommended and optional metadata elements to assist data creators in prioritising more important metadata.

The metadata is based on existing Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) and SpatioTemporal Asset Catalog (STAC) standards and specifications relevant to earth observation data and machine learning applications with some additions to include innovative elements identified by the AIREO activity. Additional elements include quality indicator metadata to help data providers:

● publish structured data quality estimates and elements for users;

● assess the FAIRness of their datasets and where improvements could be made and convey this to users; and

● describe data provenance: sources, processing history and feature engineering recipes.

Compliance

A key innovation is the definition of AIREO compliance levels. Compliance levels allow users to quickly assess whether a dataset is fully described in metadata and is FAIR-compliant, whether it contains only the minimal required set of metadata or whether it is somewhere between these two. These levels also assist data providers to prioritise which metadata they could focus on to provide a more accessible dataset for users.

AIREO python library

The open-source AIREO python library provides basic functionality for data providers and users and can be accessed through the following link: aireo_lib. The aim of the library functions are:

● to help dataset creators to generate and document TDS which are FAIR, are of high quality and adhere to the

AIREO specifications;

● to assist dataset users to perform high level exploratory data analysis on an AIREO TDS. The library allows the users to explore the statistical properties of the TDS through the metadata in the catalogue and to visualise key aspects of the data; and

● to help users load an AIREO TDS and access it through common data formats used by the ML community (numpy arrays, xarray, etc.) so it can be used in training ML models in widely used libraries and platforms with minimal effort.

Compliance levels allow users to quickly assess whether a dataset is fully described in metadata and is FAIR-compliant, whether it contains only the minimal required set of metadata or whether it is somewhere between these two.

Jenny Hanafin is the Earth Observation Activity Lead at ICHEC. Her extensive experience in many aspects of remote sensing, includes operating satellite sensors for EUMETSAT while a postdoc at Imperial College London, to developing a system to retrieve atmospheric humidity from the Ordnance Survey Ireland network of GPS receivers for use in the Met Éireann forecast model. Her qualifications include BSc in Marine Science, National University of Ireland, Galway, and PhD in Physical Oceanography and Meteorology at the Rosenstiel School of Marine and Atmospheric Science, University of Miami.

Future developments

At this point, the AIREO Specification, Best Practice Guidelines and Python library are available to all interested parties on the AIREO website: www.aireo.net.

This release is a vital step to enable more training datasets to become available. The resources themselves are at the stage where they will develop through hands-on use by the community and feedback received will be used in future versions and updates.

T: 01 524 1608 E: jenny.hanafin@ichec.ie W: www.ichec.ie

report conference

Irish Renewable Energy Summit 2022

Speakers: David Kelly, Gas Networks Ireland; Eamon Ryan TD, Minister for Environment, Climate and Communications; William Walsh, Sustainable Energy Authority of Ireland and Maria Ryan, SSE Renewables.

Jemima Jowett-Ive, Shell Energy Europe, with Ross McNally and Peter Rodgers, ERM.

Aoife Foley, Davy and Ciara Lambe, Arup with Ray Langton and Ciaran Byrne, Sustainable Energy Authority of Ireland. Bob Hanna, Smart Grid Ireland with Derek Russell, Energia and Keelin O’Brien, O’Brien Energy Consulting Ltd.

Tony Lynch, Gas Networks Ireland speaks with attendees at the Gas Networks Ireland exhibition stand. Speakers: Ellen Diskin, ESB Networks; Niall Goodwin, Wind Energy Ireland; Siobhán McHugh, The Demand Response Association of Ireland and Bobby Smith, Energy Storage Ireland.

The annual Irish Renewable Energy Summit took place as a hybrid event in February 2022. Attendees joined us both in Croke Park, Dublin and virtually and heard from a number of local and visiting speakers including Eamon Ryan, TD, Minister for Environment, Climate and Communications; Catharina Sikow-Magny, European Commission; Claire Haggett, The University of Edinburgh and James Carton, Dublin City University. In partnership with the Sustainable Energy Authority of Ireland and supported by Gas Networks Ireland, SSE Renewables and Technology Partner, Hitachi Energy, the summit brought together key stakeholders from across the energy sector to discuss how the contribution from renewable energy can be maximised and implemented most effectively.

We would like to take this opportunity to thank our summit sponsors, all speakers and delegates who joined us, both in Croke Park, Dublin and virtually, and made the summit a huge success.

Chloe Kinsella, Cenergise with Richard Walshe, ART Generation.