Pauline O'Reilly (Green Party) | Oireachtas source

I thank the witnesses for staying to answer our questions. We really appreciate it, as we know it is late.

I am trying to get my head around this. What Ms Donnelly is speaking about is dealing in reality, rather than the idea that we can just change all of these things overnight but in time, with regard to the kind of usage people have for data. If those policies come on stream around those twin tracks of new and existing data centres, do we then know if how much that should reduce the demand is factored in? Is there a target for how much that would reduce the demand? Likewise, has the CCAC looked at the scenario where with that reduction, it means we will hit that target, or hit it earlier? It is that demand management which sometimes I feel is kind of an afterthought in energy security. We are planning for the demand that there is at the moment. We are planning for no policy changes, and then, sure if we can reduce it, we will. However, that has to be factored in at the very start. That is the frustrating bit, I think. It is also a frustrating bit for the public to not really understand that there are changes coming about.

Ms MacEvilly spoke about how fast other countries are doing this and rolling this out, and the frustration around the length of time.

To be fair, it is taking a long time as well for these policies to come out. That creates a problem in terms of us ramping up those other pieces.

The other question I want to ask is about district heating. I may have missed what was said earlier. I am interested in hearing about the part it can play and perhaps the demand reduction, the efficiencies of scale and so on and so forth. We have had very interesting sessions here on district heating. It seems like a very exciting possibility for Ireland. I would love to see how fast it could be rolled out. What are the issues in terms of all of the problems there are to getting district heating working onstream quickly? Are they resolvable quickly and what kind of speed could we roll out some of it? I think district heating is quite untapped for Ireland. Data centres are part of that conversation as well but it is not the entire conversation around district heating.