Dr. Paul Deane:

I will address Deputy Haughey's question on data centres. There are pros and cons to data centres in terms of their impact on energy and on climate. We are quite fortunate in Ireland that we have a lot of very ambitious data centre owners, some of the large corporates, for example. They have very good net-zero targets for 2030. These are actually more ambitious that our national targets. It is important to have those people in this country because it creates a policy pull. They are investing a lot in renewables and different smart technologies. That is important. We must also acknowledge the financial contribution that those companies make to the Exchequer and also in terms of digitalisation. I did not have to come to Dublin today because I can use Teams. Data centres and the modern digital economy play a fundamental role in enabling a lot of the really positive stuff.

On the cons, any increase in electricity demand is mainly coming from data centres. This makes Ireland a little bit unusual in comparison to other European member states. About 14% of all the electricity consumed last year was by data centres. This year we added on the equivalent of about 200,000 homes worth of electricity usage onto the power grid from data centres alone.

We are going through a number of crises within the energy and electricity sectors in Ireland. We have a physical crisis within the power sector and we have a price crisis. The price crisis is very clearly, as Mr. O'Donoghue mentioned, caused by natural gas and the invasion of Ukraine by Russia. However, the physical crisis that we have here is our own doing. It is our own failure to deliver new gas-fired generation. To help out the power system when the wind is not strong and the sun is not shining, we need to have conventional generation. That is where we have dropped the ball in Ireland. The consequence of increasing demand at a time when the ability to produce energy is reducing is not a good strategy. My view is that there needs to be a pause for reflection until we figure out and resolve the physical crisis that we have in Ireland.

Once we do that and build the conventional generation that allows us to restore the Irish power system to its needed reliability, adequacy and robustness, the conversation needs to pivot not on how many data centres we have but on the type we encourage and welcome. Some of the large corporates have ambitious strategies for what they call the 24-7 use of renewable energy, which entails using green power every hour. Companies that can deliver on that would have a much lower impact on emissions and a benign impact on the power system in Ireland. To deliver on it, the data centre companies would need not only to invest in renewables, which many of them are doing, but also invest significantly in flexibility on their own side and in energy storage. If we can carve out a pathway whereby we can attract the data centres into our economy and society and prove the concept can work, the centres will have a benign impact on our emissions and energy system. To remain relevant in a world in which we all need to reduce emissions, we need to reduce fossil fuel reliance. Data centres that cannot demonstrate an ability to operate right across the year with as much renewable energy as possible are just not compatible with our national goals.