As recently reported in the Irish Times, the Wind Industry currently employs 2,000 people in the Republic. Yet this only represents about 10% of the total direct employment created in Europe and the wider world as a result of Irish wind farms. This is because many of the total jobs created directly are in manufacturing (of turbines, components etc), R&D, maintenance and other services, which are lost to other countries who then export to us. To date, Irish wind farms have been developed as multiple relatively small projects in a dispersed and uncoordinated manner, and so the Irish wind industry has not been able to benefit from any significant economies of scale, nor has the country been able to attract related manufacturing capacity to locate here. This means that we miss out on potentially huge employment opportunities in the wind sector, despite our world class domestic wind resource.
To develop comparable wind farms to ours, Germany for instance can create more than 5 times the jobs that are created in Ireland because Germany has managed to capture much of the manufacturing opportunity. Energy Bridge is a project of the scale required to harness this opportunity.
