Ossian Smyth (Dún Laoghaire, Green Party) | Oireachtas source

On the question of the current demand for electricity on a day like today, I do not believe that the demand for electricity alters with the wind. The typical energy peak demand is something like 6 GW or 7 GW. On a day when there is no wind, we are faced with challenges, because a lot of our energy comes from wind. We could get as little as 0% on a day when there is no wind. We also get renewable energy from other sources. For example, we have hydropower and so on. We get as much as 75% of our energy from wind on a windy day. We are transitioning to a completely different energy system from what we had before, which was based on baseload and adding to that. We are moving away from that towards peaking power plants to balance dips in the power supply. It comes back to Deputy Bríd Smith's question about why we are adding 2 GW of additional wind power over the next ten years.

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