Oireachtas Joint and Select Committees

Tuesday, 18 April 2023

Joint Oireachtas Committee on Climate Action

Pre-Legislative Scrutiny of the General Scheme of the Energy (Windfall Gains in the Energy Sector) Bill 2023

Ms Catharina Sikow-Magny:

Yes. The long-term contract is one element. However, I refer to all the proposals and agreements that we now have in speeding up the uptake of renewables. Now we have a renewable target at the EU level agreed a couple of weeks ago by the Council and the European Parliament at 42.5% by 2030. We then have binding targets also for using renewable fuels and renewable hydrogen in industry etc. All these measures are combined with the permitting facilitation and streamlining. We make sure that we will have renewables coming in on stream much faster than we had foreseen a couple of years ago still. I think this will naturally push out gas from the mix. On top of it, the electricity market design, with the measures that I briefly touched upon, will facilitate the uptake of renewable and decarbonised sources. We will also make sure that the necessary complement to renewables, which are increasingly volatile – if we think of solar and wind, they are volatile – we will have the flexibility and storage in place, which, again, must be decarbonised. All these measures put together will contribute to speeding up the uptake of clean sources of energy, which than can then phase out on a permanent basis not only Russian gas, but other fossils as well.