Ireland's Commission for Regulation of Utilities (CRU), the state body that regulates energy and water utilities, shut the comment window on EirGrid's Grid Code Modification MPID 345 on Wednesday 29 July, and says it will decide as a matter of urgency. That account reaches us through a regulatory digest published by the law firm Arthur Cox rather than from CRU directly1.
MPID 345 sets the compliance and derogation framework for three technical obligations on transmission-connected demand facilities. Fault ride through requires a site to stay connected through a brief voltage dip instead of tripping to onsite backup generators. Robustness to RoCoF concerns the rate at which grid frequency changes. Active power recovery governs how quickly a site returns to normal draw once a fault has cleared. Operators unable to meet them can seek a derogation, a time-limited exemption, through a streamlined group route lasting 24 months and applied via a Demand Utilisation Threshold, a measure of how much of its connected capacity a site actually draws2.
EirGrid and SONI, which operate the transmission grids in the Republic and Northern Ireland respectively, issued the fault-ride-through curtailment procedure itself on 30 June. MPID 345 is the compliance machinery arriving underneath it. A regulator that drafts a two-year escape hatch into a rule before the rule bites is telling you what it expects the queue of non-compliant operators to look like.
The distinction matters commercially. A campus that trips to diesel every time the grid wobbles is a liability the system operator must plan around; one that rides the dip is a customer. Ireland is now pricing that difference into the terms of connection rather than settling it at the admission gate.
