Oireachtas Joint and Select Committees

Wednesday, 26 September 2018

Joint Oireachtas Committee on Climate Action

Third Report of the Citizens' Assembly: Discussion

2:00 pm

Mr. Peter O'Shea:

I will talk about the connection question. As Mr. Manley said, the enduring connection policy is in place. My understanding is that it was open for months and several gigawatts of new plants sought to connect in that period across a couple of hundred applications. The issue is that grid capacity is scarce and that is why there will be difficulties in different areas. From the ESB perspective, it tries to lead the demand, if it can, and build out capacity in advance of the requirement but there will always be difficult points where more people want to access the grid system than there is availability. That is for the system operators in ESB Networks, and more so EirGrid, to objectively decide how they allocate that capacity.