Oireachtas Joint and Select Committees
Tuesday, 5 October 2021
Joint Oireachtas Committee on Climate Action
Energy Charter Treaty, Energy Security, Liquefied Natural Gas and Data Centres: Discussion (resumed)
Ms Aoife MacEvilly:
Again, that was a very specific question. I am more familiar, as it turns out, with the 1999 Act around demand connections. Our responsibilities under that Act are to ensure that reasonable demands are met, as well as to ensure that we have approved the terms and conditions of connection offers, and so on. I am not sure from what the Senator said that there is necessarily a conflict in respect of the climate legislation. Often, we have to read pieces of legislation together. However, it is fair to say that we have not necessarily built that into our process as yet. We will reflect on that. The Acts can be taken together, in terms of how we manage them. Many connections are for new homes and businesses. We do not want to stand in the way of these. We will try to look at it in a pragmatic way. We called out data centre demand as a specific area that drives particular challenges for the system and we are looking to deal with that demand and those connection requests in a manner that helps them mitigate the impact that they are having on the system. Hopefully, that will be done in a low-carbon manner, as Mr. Gannon mentioned. If the data centres could build some combination of green generation and battery storage on-site, then they would contribute. We are looking for those kinds of opportunities.