Bríd Smith (Dublin South Central, People Before Profit Alliance) | Oireachtas source

First, particularly to those who are involved in trying to incentivise the market, I personally find it quite depressing and quite shocking that everything is about a business opportunity and the incentivisation of the market when the context of these discussions is the most shocking point of the crisis of our of climate catastrophe that we have ever faced. It like not looking up while the comet is hurtling towards the planet. We are facing the possibility of human life not being able to exist on the planet within a matter of years, yet everything is about how we incentivise the market and how we create business opportunities. If the knowledge exists and the ability to do all this is available, it should be used for the common good and should not be seen as a business opportunity. That is why I have a problem with all of this being done by developers and markets. Although EirGrid has said it does the planning, it facilitates the market rather than seeing it right through to the bitter end. On that basis, I want to ask EirGrid, when it made that nice quote at the end of its intervention that “the greenest MW is the one we do not consume”, could that be applied to data centres and could it be said the greenest data centre is the one that is not built, given the context of this crisis?

Maybe EirGrid could comment on how much the private developers and offshore energy have put back in. EirGrid and the national grid are doing a great job preparing for this, but how much do the others put back into the system relative to the so-called business opportunity gains from it?