Oireachtas Joint and Select Committees

Wednesday, 12 June 2024

Joint Oireachtas Committee on Agriculture, Food and the Marine

Use of Agricultural Land for Renewable Energy: ESB Networks

Mr. Nicholas Tarrant:

We are happy to address the question. There are over 800,000 ha of forestry in Ireland. It has doubled since the mid-1980s. We have a policy on distance to overhead lines. We are certainly seeing vegetation in general on the network as being a very significant problem when it comes to customer service and network reliability for customers. We are here to ensure we have a reliable service for customers. It is a requirement to have forestry trees cut where they are adjacent to overhead lines.

I might ask Mr. Rossiter to elaborate on the forestry piece of it. We will come back to the general question about what we do around vegetation across the network in general because we have a dominant overhead line network, which is quite unique in Europe in many ways, because we have a very dispersed population.

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