Simon Coveney (Cork South Central, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

The point I am clearly not explaining well enough is that by building more wind farms, we also build capacity for others looking to build wind farms, connect them to the grid and sell into the system. A scale is necessary for a vibrant on and offshore wind industry. It is likewise for the solar industry. When Eli Lilly in Kinsale decided to build a solar farm next door to its manufacturing facility, that was a good thing which we encouraged. When other companies look to build a wind farm to decarbonise their systems, that is a good thing. In Cork Harbour, four of the very large pharmaceutical companies have large wind turbines right in the middle of their campus. That is a good thing and it builds capacity from an engineering, design and supply chain perspective to develop the kind of capacity we need for the scale of wind energy projects we are planning for the next 30 years.

There is another side to that argument. I get the argument that, if the only wind farms built are to generate energy for new industrial projects, we are not decarbonising the grid at the pace we need to for other users. I hear that but we can do both. It is easier to do both if we have scale in the wind industry. Anyone who goes to a wind industry conference today versus five years ago will see it is a totally different scale. Some of the largest wind energy companies in the world are coming to Ireland because we have projects happening at scale. Data centres and semiconductor and high-energy pharmaceutical manufacturing play a part in that, which needs to be recognised.