Mr. Jerry McEvilly:

In Friends of the Earth, we are hugely conscious of the fact it is very challenging for all Government authorities, and Ms Connolly has mentioned the difficulty around timelines and the need to ensure security of supply in the short term when there are real, hard, specific, near-term climate obligations at the same time. I would like to emphasise that the context has fundamentally changed with the Russian invasion of Ukraine. It has never been clearer that now is the time to actively prioritise reducing gas demand wherever feasible, and that means actively integrating our climate obligations into our energy planning. I also emphasise that this situation is not going to go away by any stretch of the imagination, and by “this situation” I mean the need to adhere to climate obligations. That is what the Paris Agreement is all about. This pressure is only going to increase, which underlines the need for near-term action.

I would like to raise an example of another concern we have in Friends of the Earth. Some 15 or 20 years ago, it was extremely clear that Ireland needed to move away from peat extraction and the burning of peat in the electricity sector. That did not happen for the best part of 20 years and, suddenly, there was a crunch leading to major pressures on workers and communities in the midlands. We do not want the same situation in the context of moving away from other fossil fuels and, therefore, we need to plan now.

In terms of a diversity of resources potentially not resulting in greater throughput, on the one hand, there is a significant moral hazard risk where the industry or networks would publicly commit to hydrogen, biomethane or carbon capture and storage, CCS, as a future solution but they still continue to expand infrastructure, play up sustainability of their supplies or produce plans that maximise gas reliance, safe in the knowledge that they will not face any consequences if these measures and technologies are not rolled out in time. We find it hard to envisage a situation where significant gas infrastructure is put in place yet that does not apply significant pressure for those gas supplies to be used, thereby increasing emissions.

I do not want to lecture the CRU on network costs and prices but I see that Friends of the Earth and the SEAI have underlined that as more consumers move away from gas usage, it leaves fewer consumers to cover the fixed costs of the network, so they are increasingly paying higher prices, which can then lead to more consumers moving away. This means the push for even more energy efficiency measures and microgeneration is only going to increase. That is a further additional risk worth taking into account.