Dr. James Carton:

I would like to thank the committee for the opportunity to address members on accelerating and achieving the full potential of Ireland’s offshore wind resource and green hydrogen, with the view to contributing to Ireland’s, Europe’s and the global energy demand.

Energy consumption and use is a major contributor to carbon emissions. We must transition with haste to more sustainable energy, food and waste systems. My contribution will focus on decarbonisation and on the necessary role of the energy carrier of green hydrogen in Ireland.

The first key message is that our energy system and its decarbonisation must be viewed as the complex integrated system that it is. As a country, we have introduced incremental change that has not been effective and that will not achieve our necessary cumulative carbon reductions towards 2030 or 2050.

The second key message is that we know how to decarbonise and we know what do. We must manage energy consumption. We must electrify as much as is possible, through heat-pumps, battery electric vehicles, BEVs, etc. We must increase energy efficiency and deploy renewable energy fast and at a large scale. However, electricity can only bring us so far. Variable wind is not useful on its own all of the time. Only so many cables of a limited capacity will be acceptable or placed underground, overhead or subsea.

What will happen to heavy duty vehicles, intercity trains, intercontinental airplanes, ships, agricultural fertilizer, cement, aluminium, etc? At the same time that we deploy renewables, we must deploy and scale up the energy carriers that are necessary to decarbonise. We also need to power our electricity grid when there is no wind. Therefore, we need energy storage many orders of magnitude greater than what batteries alone can provide.

I ask the committee to think about hydrogen: green hydrogen from renewable energy. In a recent report from International Renewable Energy Agency, IRENA, hydrogen could meet 12% of world energy use by 2050. Others suggest a figure of 24%. My colleague mentioned a figure of 15% in Germany alone by 2030. To enable this transformational energy storage change, what should we do?

First, we need a hydrogen strategy that would enable policy development and guide investment now. We need to stimulate suitable demand for hydrogen. Production is not necessarily a bottleneck, but it just needs to be stimulated. We need to focus on hydrogen valleys, through a cluster of producers, distributors and users. This reduces risk, reduces cost and enables scale. We need to implement supporting mechanisms for green hydrogen infrastructure. We need to implement the biofuels obligation that supports green hydrogen. We need to deploy guarantees of origin as necessary, models of which are found across Europe. We need to deploy large-scale hydrogen storage in Ireland for consistent energy supply, which is directly connected to the geopolitical energy security challenges that we face today. We need to create and support export opportunities for green hydrogen, as we heard from our German colleague earlier. We need to further study of the role of green hydrogen to decarbonise heat. We need to investigate further work from the SEAI. We need to launch a national hydrogen research centre to enable high-value jobs and skills. This would involve a similar approach to what we have done in this country with tech companies, medical device companies and the pharmaceuticals industry.

The final message is that decarbonisation can support rural and coastal development and jobs. It can enhance our energy security, keep our homes warm and keep our cities clean. To accelerate and achieve the full potential of Ireland’s offshore wind resources, we need green hydrogen sooner rather than later.

I thank the committee for this opportunity to speak and I am happy to take questions.