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How would you like to get your electricity from wind power, and at cheaper rates than the ESB?  It’s really easy to switch to Airtricity online, all you need is your ESB account number (on your bill), and if you have the number of the meter reading to hand it makes things even quicker.  Within 5 minutes you can be finished with ESB and fossil fuels!

Airtricity is owned by Scottish and Southern Energy (SSE).  The renewable-energy company, established in 1999, was the first independent supplier of green energy to customers both in the Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland.  It has now built up a considerable infrastructure of wind farms across Ireland, with 17 onshore wind farms generating 878 mega watts of electricity – enough to power 180,000 households. At present, the company provides green energy to just over 60,000 customers across the island of Ireland, of which 45,000 are SMEs and 15,000 are domestic customers.

Airtricity has also just announced that they are to create 200 jobs in the Irish market, in the areas of sales, customer support, billing and support services. Fifty of the positions will be created in Airtricity’s headquarters in Sandymount, Co Dublin, with the remaining 150 comprising outsourced roles.  Green, clean, and profitable: these are the kind of green shoots that matter.

As a sometime film technician, for me the most noticeable impact of climate change in Ireland has been the increasing wind speeds – in the past 18 months I’ve been on two commercials that were closed down because it was too windy to shoot; that had never happened to me in the previous 15 years. However, there are may be some positive side effects to this new phenomena, energy independence being chief among them.  The creators of Spirit of Ireland view Ireland as infinitely rich in the sustainable and ecological power of wind.  The group’s idea is clever because it addresses the issue of wind’s intermittent nature by storing the energy in the form of reservoirs, which then create hydroelectricity on demand.  It’s pretty neat. And for proof that energy independence is not just possible but profitable, Elizabeth Kolbert’s New Yorker article is a must-read: she describes how the residents of a Danish island went from impoverished to wealthy in a matter of a few years, simply by using the wind that was already rushing across their land every day.

Besides capturing the wind itself, the future of wind power technology in Ireland is promising as well, as last week’s announcement of 250 new jobs in Mayo testifies.

So if you agree that the future of wind is mighty, you can start using it yourself today: Airtricity gets at least 70% of their electricity from Irish wind farms, it’s cheaper than the ESB and it only takes 5 minutes to switch: isn’t that as refreshing as a cool breeze?