People are being advised to spread their electricity use evenly through the day for the system to function better.
A new report from the Climate Change Advisory Council said the Government needs to act with more urgency if Ireland is to meet its 2025 and 2030 electricity capacity targets.
The Council, which published its annual review of the electricity sector, said Ireland's renewable electricity generation remains "significantly below" the required annual increase to meet growing demand and sectoral emissions ceilings.
It has made a series of recommendations, which includes a call to rapidly finalise all elements of planning reform to accelerate the deployment of renewable energy generation.
It also said that the transposition of EU legislation will allow Ireland to avail of "flexibility provisions that other European member states are utilising to roll out renewable projects faster".
The report found electricity emissions actually fell in 2023, driven by a rise in imported electricity from the UK coupled with a considerable decline in the use of coal for electricity generation.
Electricity 'gridlock'
Climate Change Advisory Council Chair Marie Donnelly said people need to think about their usage.
"In addition to rolling out [a] sufficient quantity of sustainable electricity, we will need to start using it in a clever way," she said.
"If everybody was on the M50 at 8 o'clock in the morning it would be gridlock.
"If that same volume was spread out evenly through the day everybody would be able to move - it's the same with electricity.
"If we all use electricity between 5pm and 7pm in the evening then we get a snarling of the situation."
A split-screen of electricity pylons and a home heater.Ms Donnelly said while things need to change it is not all bad news.
"In the electricity sector the emissions went down over 20% last year which is very good," she said.
"But much of that came from imports of electricity from the UK and of course the emissions don't count for that.
"The speed at which we are rolling out renewables is not sufficient not to meet our 2025 target, nor indeed to 2030 target.
"This is going to cost all of us more money because we're not using our own natural resources to have sustainable electricity," she added.
Renewable connections
Last year saw just 0.6GW of new grid-scale onshore renewable connections - well below the 1.6 GW required annually to meet 2030 targets.
"The Government must now move urgently to finalise all elements of planning reform that will help accelerate renewable delivery," the Council said.
It also said an important element is time-of-use tariffs that incentivise customers to adjust their electricity use voluntarily, either through automation or manually, to reduce expenses.
"As the name suggests, the price varies depending on the time of day, reflecting the marginal network costs and/or generation costs of electricity in the wholesale market," the report found.
"To date, there have been over 1.6 million smart meters installed; however, since time-of-use tariffs became available in 2021, the uptake has remained relatively low, with only 330,000 households switched to a smart tariff in March 2024," it added.
The Climate Change Advisory Council is publishing sectoral reviews between May and October across a range of different areas.
