Brian Leddin (Limerick City, Green Party) | Oireachtas source

Thank you very much, Commissioner Simson, for those opening remarks. This will be a short engagement as we have until 3.45 p.m. I propose that each member takes just two minutes to address their questions to the Commissioner to ensure every member gets an opportunity to do that.

Commissioner, you touched on many of the areas I was interested in raising with you, but we might go into those a little more. You are absolutely correct in saying that every member state is unique. Given the vast resources in Ireland, we would say we are in a particularly good position, certainly when compared to other member states. The conversation here has changed significantly in the last few years. We are starting to realise that we can use the resources we have, not only to decarbonise our own country, but to help Europe decarbonise as well. This committee is very engaged and we have had very significant public sessions recently. We hope to publish a report very soon on the larger opportunity. We talk not about the 5 GW but about the 50 GW, which is off the south and west coast of Ireland, and how we realise that. To realise that, we need to ramp up the scale of development enormously. This is a scale that is hard to imagine but can be done. We need to develop further interconnection with Europe and to be able to transfer that power from this island directly to the European Continent.

My fundamental question is on how the Commission and Europe can help Ireland to, in turn, help Europe. This is a very new conversation and with the war in Ukraine, everybody is thinking about it now. I think the penny is dropping in this country that we can really help Europe. I hope that this is understood across the member states and in the Commission.

With respect to hydrogen, we talk about green hydrogen here. We do not talk about low-carbon hydrogen because we have that vast renewable energy resource. It will be with renewable electricity, through electrolysis, that hydrogen would be generated.

It would then become a storage medium for generation and, perhaps, industry and transport. There are risks with green hydrogen. We have a significant concern that hydrogen, when it is blended with natural gas, could, in effect, lock in natural gas for decades to come. That is not what we want to happen. We want to go to 100% hydrogen so that it is a quicker decarbonisation path than anybody envisaged before. Recognising that Ireland has that unique renewable resource, the fundamental question is how the Commission can help us to realise it because that, in turn, will help Europe.