Alice-Mary Higgins (Independent) | Oireachtas source

I welcome the Minister to the House. I was going to begin by outlining the broader context of the discussion in terms of the urgency of the transition that is needed. The sixth interim assessment report from the third working group of the IPCC, published last April, made it very clear that there is no space for continuing with fossil fuel expansion or the continuation of fossil fuel exploitation. All of our future energy needs, and we need to be transitioning and substituting, need to be coming from renewable energy. Wind energy must be core, not as a supplement or a competitor in the energy market. It needs to be treated, with other renewables, as the future of the energy market. What happened at European level with the EU taxonomy, which was an opportunity to redirect major investment into renewables, was regrettable. With renewables there can be a very long period of time for the return, for wind energy and certainly for solar.In terms of redirecting energy investment into those areas it was regrettable that the taxonomy was watered down and gas and nuclear were included, meaning the same old areas of investment were again mislabelled as sustainable or indeed renewable. It was a missed opportunity in terms of investment and also international credibility for the European Union on its energy transition.

Wind Energy Ireland has shown the incredible potential there is in Ireland. In 2022, wind generation in Ireland displaced almost €2.6 billion worth of fossil gas in carbon credits from the wholesale market at a time when gas has been shown to be politically, economically and sometimes physically volatile. This displacement is needed urgently and must be accelerated. In March last year, we had a saving of approximately €390 million from wind generation. This shows how important wind generation can be as part of a just transition on this island. In order for wind energy to reach its full potential, however, it is crucial that it is utilised in the context of the public good and not simply seen as an add-on to allow for the expansion in large energy usage.

I welcome the points made by the previous speaker Senator Hoey on the need for us to look to community wind energy generation also to national wind energy generation and a reserve for national uses. We have had the National Oil Reserves Agency for a long time and the idea for that was to act as a safety net. One of the safety nets we need is ensuring the renewable energy we have in this State is available for crucial public goods purposes. That is in the context of concerning evidence and research from, for example, Professor Hannah Daly from University College Cork, UCC, who, in her paper on electricity and gas demand, highlighted that electricity demand is projected to grow from between 19% and 50% over the next ten years. While in most of Europe demand for electricity is stationary or declining, electricity demand from large energy users such as data centres in Ireland has increased by more than 200%. It is important when we talk about wind energy and the need to scale it up that it is not used as an excuse to justify scaling up demand, particularly from large energy users. We do not want to have windmills being built and tied to data centres which are adding to our energy usage. It is almost like the argument that is not enough to recycle and we have moved past that and now talk about reduce and reuse. We need to be reducing energy demand-----