Eamon Ryan (Dublin Bay South, Green Party) | Oireachtas source

I move amendment No. 2:

In page 24, between lines 8 and 9, to insert the following:

“Amendment of section 9 of Act of 1999

11. Section 9 of the Act of 1999 is amended in subsection (1) by substituting the following paragraphs for (m) and (n):“(m) to carry out investigations into the functioning of the electricity and gas markets,

(n) to decide upon and impose effective and proportionate measures to promote effective competition,

(o) to have regard to the benefits of developing demand-side participation in electricity markets, including through energy efficiency, demand-response, distributed generation, energy storage and the use of digital technologies,

(p) to have regard to the facilitation of consumers to provide, consume and trade electricity that they have generated,

(q) to have regard to the need to provide for flexibility in the trading of electricity to facilitate trading close to real time in order to better integrate renewable electricity and provide accurate price signals to the market,

(r) to have regard to the use of energy storage technologies in participating in the balancing of electricity demand and supply, and

(s) to have regard to the need to ensure that grid connection policy takes account of renewable energy policy, including any such policy in relation to community energy projects.”.”.

I thank the Minister for providing access to his officials to revise some of the amendments we discussed on Committee Stage. I hope the revised wording can be agreed. Deputy Bríd Smith will address her amendment. Two things emerged in the process of revising the amendments. On the Order of Business the other day, I said we are legislating blind in not having a consolidated version of the Bill. During the Committee Stage debate, I referred to a section which, in effect, did not exist anymore. I said it to the Taoiseach and it applies in other areas but in this critical piece of legislation, we are going to have to find resources somewhere to consolidate Bills to make them intelligible. It is just not right that we, as legislators, are dealing with legislation where we are legislating blind in some instances. That is one lesson to emerge from the debate on the Bill to date.

I am pleased we were able to table the amendments but they are insufficient to position the State to become a leader in the area of matching efficiency and variable supply, promoting self generation and getting the benefit that should and could accrue to this country for being good at this energy transition. We will need much more extensive legislation to take into account the various pieces of the jigsaw the Commission will put in place later this year.

From a green perspective, the news today was deeply disconcerting that the Commission has given us a free pass for the next ten years in terms of not having any effective increase in our climate targets after 2020. That is all the more reason we must put energy and effort into this area because in the absence of any effective increase in our targets what I fear will happen is that we will fall behind the industrial revolution that is happening elsewhere. The countries that have ambitious targets are the ones that will make all the changes and we will end up importing the technology in 20 years' time at huge cost to the State. It will be far more expensive for us to do the transition then.

I hope the Minister will be able to accept the amendment I have tabled but also that he will dedicate the resources to preparing ambitious further legislation to take into account the market reforms and governance reforms that will be coming from the European Union as part of the 2030 package. Even if in a sense we have opted out, which it seems to me we have, at least let us not opt out on the economic opportunity. Let us not see the economy go backwards as an un-green or brown state that does not marry what we have, which is a huge variety of renewable supplies with tech industries. Let us at least try to take that opportunity before it goes.

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