Jennifer Whitmore (Wicklow, Social Democrats) | Oireachtas source

I ask the Minister of State to consider amendment No. 158. If it is not 100% correct in terms of technicalities, I ask him and the Department to look to reflect its intent in the Bill somewhere. Essentially, the amendment puts a net zero target on the electricity sector for 2030. When we are talking about a finite or polluting resource, the first principle is not to use it. When we are talking about transport, we have the avoid principle and when we are talking about waste, we have the reduce principle. However, when it comes to energy, there does not seem to be a similar principle on which we focus with this Bill or even from a policy perspective across Government. There is no significant focus on demand management or trying to keep our energy usage emissions down. In fact, we are seeing the opposite. We are seeing two arms of the Government pulling against each other when it comes to this. I am talking about data centres and electric vehicles. Both are seen to be one of the highest users of electricity and the key drivers of increases in electricity usage over the next ten years. I do not know whether the Minister of State noticed an article by Caroline O'Doherty in the Irish Independenttoday stating that EirGrid has said there are so many new applications from data centres looking for electricity connections that to power them would be the equivalent of 70% of our national usage. This is an incredible statistic at a time when we are here debating how we are going to get our emissions down. The projected electricity consumption by 2030 based on the current connection agreements is 33%, so 33% of our electricity usage will be from data centre usage. It would be remiss of us to not look at this exponential growth in electricity usage from data centres.

I know the Government has a target of 70% renewables for electricity by 2030 but I am putting in 100% because we need to cap it. We need to say we are going to drive down our electricity usage until we are in a position to ensure that 100% of that can come from renewable resources. We are not there yet. I am staggered by the statistics in the article in the Irish Independenttoday. A total of 70% of electricity usage could come from data centres. I heard yesterday that one third of global data will be housed in Irish data centres so this is a runaway horse over which we have no control. It does not seem as though we are taking it into consideration in the climate Bill. I do not know whether there is real active and continued analysis by Government of the implications of having these data centres. When I raised it at a meeting of the committee a couple of weeks ago, the comments were that there are economic benefits from it and data centres have storage capacity and may be able to play a role in storage of energy and slow release or off-peak release of it. That is all well and good but it is not set in stone at the moment and until we have finalised our attitude to and policy on data centres, we need to say that 100% of our electricity needs to come from renewable sources. I believe it is a target we can meet.

We talk about all these other areas such as transport, which will be difficult. The committee heard that having one million electric vehicles on the road by 2030 is a very difficult target to meet. It will be difficult to get that cultural shift into our agriculture and land usage to address carbon usage. When it comes to electricity, it is an easy target we could meet as long as we start controlling some of the usages of electricity such as data centres and start introducing demand management measures to deal with that. We are going to tell people we expect them to buy electric vehicles and that, from 2030, we are going to ban anything other than electric vehicles so they will have to go and buy them. It is a big investment for people. They are going to buy those vehicles and the energy they use with them could still create emissions so, again, there is very little policy alignment coming from the Government on this issue.

We had a lot of discussion about just transition and I made the point repeatedly that we cannot have a very narrow focus when we are talking about just transition; we need a broad focus. This is what I am talking about. As a nation, are we going to put the onus on individuals and individual households, who may not have the finance or capacity to own electric vehicles? Are we going to tell them that those are the things we expect them to do and, at the same time, tell big corporations and data centres they can create and use up as much energy as they want and we will not control what they are doing?This would be unfair and would go against the principles of just transition, which is why I wanted that definition in the Bill. It is important that it is in the Bill because we are already seeing how the Government is prioritising big players.

A business-as-usual approach will be taken with the big corporations while the barriers and onus are put on individuals. That is a-----