At home over the holidays last month, relatives and friends bombarded me with questions about my time so far in Ireland: the standard chorus of “What is it like?” and “Is it as rainy as they say?” (yes) and “So when can I come visit?” that I’m sure anyone who has studied abroad has experienced. While responding to these repeated questions can get a bit tiresome, having to debrief my experience time and again has given me the opportunity to reflect on the past 3 months while looking ahead at what’s to come in 2025.
What I was overwhelmingly struck by is my growing realization as I progress in the Masters of how appropriate of a location Dublin is for the study of energy systems and sustainable urban planning. While I chose to study in Ireland because I was attracted to the unique interdisciplinary program Trinity offered, and was intrigued by the more manageable size of the Irish national transmission system compared to the sprawling and disjointed network in the US, my studies and my own lived experience in Dublin has shown me that there is a whole ecosystem of factors at play that make Dublin so uniquely situated to be an incubation hub for sustainable urbanist initiatives.
First, the city has always had a culture of walking, apparent in the ambulatory structure of classics like Ulysses or the foci of Dublin history books like the recent A City Runs Through Them by Fergal Tobin. Yet this culture has not always been prioritized in policy or the built environment: as Dublin’s economy developed and the city experienced its first expansions in the 1990s to early 2000s, semi-private suburban developments were built and car-oriented transit routes were prioritized, choking out biking routes and forms of public transportation from being built. It has only been recently that the city has launched initiatives to encourage other modes of transportation, such as the Covid-era effort to create now-ubiquitous bike lanes. What I’ve learned while being in Dublin is that this culture of walking, while not always present in policy, has always existed—and that resultingly, as soon as even a small investment in pedestrian infrastructure is made, it will be well-used and well-loved. This has made Dublin city administrators enthusiastic about investing into the community, infrastructure, and culture of their city.
Secondly, Dublin, as the EU hub for technology and finance, is situated uniquely to work with and shoulder the responsibility of meeting the needs of these growing industries. This double-edged sword means that there are ample opportunities for public-private partnerships, such as a project building 5G towers in the Docklands; on the flipside, however, the Irish electric system faces a critical challenge: to meet the needs of the finance and technology sectors, and in particular the needs of the exploding data center industry, it’s predicted that in Dublin, data centers will go from comprising <5% of electric load today to almost a third of electric load in less than a decade. If these loads are unable to be met, Irish customers may face frequent blackouts, but these sectors, as significant contributors to the Irish economy, cannot be abandoned. As such, Dublin will be the center of enormous urban and energy-systems change in the next decade. Government actors, utilities, and researchers all know this—there is a sense of urgency in the research taking place here, and an enthusiasm that transcends bureaucratic or political bottlenecks, that I do not sense in the US. Dublin as a city has its work cut out for it, yet there is an enthusiasm to meet this challenge that makes me excited to learn from this process and see what the Dublin of 10 years from now looks like.