Lynn Boylan (Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

I thank the Acting Chair and thank all the guests.

I want to pick-up as well on that quote from Mr. Foley's opening statement, "The demand for electricity in Ireland is that of a normal prosperous, growing economy." On the previous occasion Mr. Foley was before the committee, he told us that the growth in the data centres or the electricity demand was also normal for a European country. When he sent on the data to back it up, it actually showed that Ireland was quite an outlier in terms of its demand growth. It is the same here. Mr. Foley is talking about 2.8% as a small increase. When we are seeing other European countries are decreasing their electricity demand, we are going in the wrong direction.

That 2.8%, while it sounds small, means that our demand is now 15% higher than it was in 2017. The issue, going back to these large energy users, is that we are like that analogy of trying to go down an escalator that is going up because we are bringing more data centres onto the system. When we do not have the back-up of the renewables, it is making that job much more difficult. Also, our economy has been shrinking for the past five consecutive quarters. The economy is not growing. That is another area.

I am particularly interested in what Mr. Foley stated in response to Deputy Whitmore about the IEA getting it wrong. That is quite a big statement. It is a big organisation, with a lot of expertise. The SEAI has also expressed concerns around the growth of demand of data centres. It stated, "There is a clear need to balance the value of data centres to a modern digitised economy, with the challenges of accommodating their electricity demand from available sources of renewable generation." The graph on demand growth clearly shows that domestic is more or less stable and it is the large energy users that are the main cause of the growth in our electricity demand.

It cannot be said that we should not be focused on demand growth. It is difficult for us as members of the committee to take that on board because it is our job to make sure it is fit for purpose. No one is saying we cannot have data centres. The digital economy is important, but it has to be matched with our capacity for electricity generation and our climate obligations.

Mr. Foley accepted when he agreed with Senator Dooley that temporary emergency generation, TEG, is an expensive mode of producing electricity. Mr. Foley said today that there is no correlation between the TEG and the data centres' demand. In 2019, a document released under freedom of information, FOI, by EirGrid to noteworthy.ietold data centres that emergency generation was required to meet their demand. EirGrid told a data centre lobby that EirGrid was doing it to help its clients and customers to get their projects built. Is it not true that temporary emergency generation has had to be developed in part to provide for the demand of these large energy users?