Eamon Ryan (Dublin South, Green Party)

We need policy directions from the CER and the Department which recognise the crisis we are in.

Section 7 concerns interconnection and there could be no better example of the incompetence and delay that has occurred in this regard. Just about everyone agrees that we need an interconnector. We have gone around the houses as regards whether it should be a merger or built project but no one knows. No one has made a decision and the dawdling has been going on for about three years and is still continuing. People say we should build a 500 MW interconnector first and then think about a second one. We need two interconnectors now. It is hugely important infrastructure, although not for the reasons Forfás seems to believe.

We have a State agency which says we need nuclear power so we will buy it off the English and ship it in or we will build our own nuclear power station and ship the power out. That is not why I want an interconnector. I do not believe the logic that Forfás is coming out with, which is that recognising that we have a transport disaster with depleting oil reserves, we need nuclear energy to power electric rail lines. Will someone tell the Minister for Transport that we need electric railways? Do we have to build a nuclear power facility to run our public transport system? I do not think so. It is not justified and it is not clever long-term thinking.

Purely on energy grounds it does not make sense to go nuclear but we do need interconnectors for the alternative vision. That comprises an interconnected European grid connecting up the offshore wind farms in whose raw material we are abundantly rich. Both interconnectors could feed power back into Europe. That is why we need such a decision today rather than tomorrow. I heard an official from the Department state the other day that such long-term wind projects are for the future, but they should be for today. Until we start getting that urgency into energy policy thinking we will be going nowhere.

Section 8 deals with emergency provisions. Deputy Broughan is right in saying that we need to consider oil as well. Oil and gas are interconnectable so, as a regulator, the CER should examine the whole energy area.

Section 10 concerns the national gas supply. We have a problem in that at European level there is no fluidity in the European gas market on which we are utterly dependent. We are becoming more dependent on it. All the regulator can say is that rather than developing CHP, which would provide a multitude of small CHP sources, we are going the same old way, which the boys in the ESB think is the right thing to do — the big 400 MW power plants. They say that is the way the Westinghouse lads do it, so it must be the right way. I am afraid it is not. It is leading us to a dependence on gas although we are at the very end of the pipeline. We need to be active at European level but the Minister did not even turn up to the European Council meeting on this issue. He was in Sacramento with the Ancient Order of Hibernians.

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