Oireachtas Joint and Select Committees
Tuesday, 9 May 2023
Joint Oireachtas Committee on Climate Action
Engagement with the Commission for Regulation of Utilities
Jennifer Whitmore (Wicklow, Social Democrats)
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I am not sure whether the commission can address this, but Meta would need to keep its accounts on track. I imagine the company would have noticed its bill was particularly low. I imagine it would have gone to the ESB to say there is an issue here, because otherwise it has a liability on its accounting system. Is that something the commission will also be looking into, that is, the notification of this? It seems incredible we have a facility that uses the electricity equivalent of 150,000 homes, the owner of which has been underpaying on its bill and the ESB did not notice this was the case for 18 months. My question is probably for Mr. Gannon. We have had two major instances with the ESB: first, where technical issues resulted in customers being overcharged by €100 million over an 11-year period without it being picked up on, and second, the undercharging of a large energy user to a value, I imagine, of tens of millions of euro. It is domestic users in the period who will be picking up the bill for that.