RECENTLY, THE GOVERNMENT and Bord na Móna came under pressure to clarify plans for large-scale energy developments. The coverage focused on process, transparency and stakeholder concerns.

But it missed the deeper question of not how these developments will happen, but why we think this is ambitious at all.

A particular kind of realism has crept into Irish policy conversations around energy, infrastructure and housing. It sounds responsible: we have constraints, so let’s accept them. Let’s reduce demand and scale back our ambitions. We don’t really need all this extra energy, this growth, this possibility.

Because it’s framed as physics, it sounds unanswerable. But the physics isn’t the problem. The choice is.

Take the influential argument from energy analysts like Vaclav Smil: modern civilisation was built on fossil fuels, a once-off energy windfall. Try to replace that with lower-density renewables, and the numbers get uncomfortable. You can’t simply swap one for the other and expect everything to stay the same. Therefore, we must scale back, consume less and accept tighter limits.

This conclusion gets presented as inevitable. It’s not. It’s a choice and a very particular one. It’s easier to praise restraint when you’ve never had to worry about having too little energy or too few opportunities. It’s a worldview that often comes from people who already have enough, whose lives won’t fundamentally change in a slower, smaller world.

Ireland is a perfect case study in this contradiction. We generate a significant share of our electricity from wind. We host vast data centres powering cloud storage and AI systems. We talk endlessly about “just transition” and climate targets. Yet when the wind drops, we import gas (mostly LNG)........

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