Denis Naughten (Roscommon-Galway, Independent) | Oireachtas source

I found Deputy Bruton's analogy in respect of oil companies interesting. He is right in that regard, but the difficulty is that in agriculture we are quite happy to have the emissions levied on the farmer who produces the beef or milk, not where it is actually consumed. This is the argument I have been making all along. The system is perverse and has built in structures that benefit big industry rather than the type of economy we have in Ireland. That is why Ireland must take a very different approach from that being taken in continental Europe, but we are not doing that.

Returning to the point raised by Deputy Whitmore, a fundamental point here is the number of data centres coming to this country. There are two types of data centres. I am not against data centresper se. If they are strategically located in particular locations across the country, they can be of great benefit. However, we should be discussing data centres that are directly connected with employment in this country, not speculative data centres. Quite a number of the data centres in the planning process are speculative data centres. We should not be facilitating those. Second, we should not facilitate any data centres in the Dublin region, despite the determination of the Industrial Development Agency, IDA, to do that, because our electricity grid just cannot take them. The cost of facilitating more data centres in the Dublin region will be astronomical in terms of the investment that will have to be made in the electricity grid, and communities across the country will have to cater for the additional pylons that will have to be brought into the Dublin region.

We are going to try to achieve 70% renewable electricity on the network by 2030, which is a very difficult challenge at this point in time. However, it is one I believe we potentially can achieve, but continuing to load more data centres onto the system makes it an unachievable target. What is morally wrong here is not only that aspect but also the fact that we are asking families across the country, through their electricity bill, to fund and subsidise the cost of that. It is wrong that we should ask families, through the public service obligation, PSO, levy and the transmission charges, to subsidise the cost of electricity going into data centres. The Government took a decision in June 2018 not to apply those charges to domestic customers and other business customers, but that has not been implemented. Deputy Whitmore is right. There must be a far broader debate and we must be far more selective with regard to the type of data centres we want to come into this country. The impression is given that it is climate efficient to bring them into Ireland because of our climate.

However, the reality is we are an isolated electricity grid in Ireland. Sadly, we will need to have a fossil fuel backup for the foreseeable future, which undermines our overall climate objectives.