Jennifer Whitmore (Wicklow, Social Democrats) | Oireachtas source

We have a very long two and a half years ahead if we must continue to face this Punch and Judy show between Fine Gael and Sinn Féin. There is an issue in regard to pre-legislative scrutiny and the processes behind it in respect of this Bill. It is not acceptable that most of us are standing up with questions for the Minister of State rather than being able to debate from a position of information. The committee received the documentation on these proposals five minutes before we were asked to have a briefing on them. There was no pre-legislative scrutiny allowed. That obviously has led to a large gap in our knowledge base regarding the Bill, its purpose, how it will be managed and what is proposed around it.

None of us wants to see any blackouts in the coming winter or any winters thereafter. I accept there is a need to deal with the situation urgently. However, the issue was raised last year. The CRU published a security of supply information note in September in which it identified a shortfall. This legislation could have been worked on and drafted at that point. Indeed, my party brought forward a motion at the time calling for a data centre moratorium because we recognised there would be a shortfall and a risk of blackouts. We offered the Government a solution for dealing with part of the problem but, unfortunately, it was ignored. It is not the case that this issue has come like a bolt out of the blue. It was foreseen. We are in this emergency situation because, unfortunately, the Government has not dealt with it in a proactive manner.

There were comments earlier about the PSO levy and how these provisions will reduce the bills for domestic levies. However, there has been no acknowledgement from the Government that it is giving with one hand and taking away with the other. While the Bill will reduce the PSO levy, it will also place additional costs on domestic bills because of the cost of the additional generation.

I am concerned that the Bill is pretty much open-ended. There is no alignment between what the CRU has said it needs and the dates by which the Bill will be in operation. The Minister of State indicated in his statement that the provisions in the Bill will cover a period out to winter 2025-26, which is not what the CRU requested. The latter has said the measures are required until the winter of 2024-25. Will he clarify this discrepancy? It seems we are giving the CRU and EirGrid carte blanchein respect of the legislation. There is also no limit on the amount of generation that can be purchased. Going through all the data, I am confused as to exactly how much will be purchased through these provisions.

The security of supply programme the CRU published identified that 300 MW of temporary emergency generation will be required for winter 2022-23.

Is that provision separate to this Bill? While the CRU welcomed the Government's decision in respect of this Bill and the procurement of 450 MW, that is actually for the winter of 2023-24. Questions arise then over exactly how much electricity generation can be procured through this Bill. Is it instead, as is my fear, completely open-ended?

The CRU stated it would need an additional 450 MW of temporary emergency generation. This amount could, however, increase to 700 MW if the security supply actions the CRU has highlighted are not implemented. Therefore, there is a risk that this Bill could, essentially, be treated like the magic porridge pot and that its provisions will just continually grow and grow. My amendments are intended to try to put some structure in place in this regard and to ensure that there is a cap on the amount of electricity that can be generated. I refer as well to the reporting mechanisms, because we want information in this regard to come before the Dáil. It cannot be the case that this legislation is giving permission just to continue to grow energy demand. I hope the Government will take these amendments on board, because it is important to have some threshold and that oversight can be brought to bear on it. The CRU also stated that an additional 200 MW have already been identified and are in the process of being procured. If this is the case, and the requirement is obviously above and beyond the 450 MW, how is that happening in the absence of this legislation or will that procurement also be covered by this legislation?

Turning to the issue of costs, it has been estimated that the 450 MW will cost approximately €350 million. Regarding the other 200 MW that I mentioned, I imagine that would then add an extra €180 million or something like that. Will the Minister of State address whether this is an additional cost that we must also deal with? Equally, if an additional charge of €40 is going to be put on domestic bills as a result of the procurement of 450 MW, and if an additional 200 MW is going to be procured outside this process as well, will that mean that another €20 will be going on each bill? I ask the Minister of State to clarify in his closing remarks exactly how much additional money will be put on domestic bills as a result of this temporary emergency generation capacity increase.

I listened closely to the Minister of State's contribution and a few things were left out. Key among those is the issue of data centres. The reason we are in this situation in reality is not because of external shocks, external demands or international issues. We are in this situation, and this has also been acknowledged by the CRU, because of the high growth of large electricity users, primarily data centres. It is unacceptable that this Bill is going through without any discussion on how we can manage the increasing demand being placed on our system by data centres. It is unacceptable that there has been no acknowledgement of this fact either in the Minister of State's speech or in this Bill. Again, an amendment in this regard has been submitted by the Social Democrats. The intention of the amendment is to identify that this is an emergency Bill and if it is an emergency Bill to deal with electricity demand and to prevent the high risk of blackouts and brownouts, to specify that emergency measures should also be brought in regarding data centres. I refer to a moratorium. Therefore, once again, we are asking that the Government bring in a moratorium on the development of data centres until there is a strategic overview of how many data centres we should have, what their benefits are, what conditions we will place on them and what we will ask them to do to be part of the solution as opposed to being the problem, which is essentially what they are now.

One area I raised with Tánaiste last week was that, despite what we are talking about here and despite the potential investment of €500 million to deal with the fallout from all these data centres, the Government has still not published its statement on data centres. It was promised for quarter 1 of this year, then for quarter 2 and then the Tánaiste told me last week that it would not be available shortly and that he has not yet received a copy or has not seen it. The question then is what exactly is the Government doing when it comes to data centres. What is its strategic focus? What is its planning? What is it taking into account? Is it just because of some bureaucratic administrative process that data centres are under the remit of the Department of Enterprise, Trade and Employment and therefore everything else is sort of operating in the absence of it? That would be a real worry. Therefore, we are asking the Government to be strategic about this issue and to take this aspect into account and to plan. A failure to plan in this regard has been clearly obvious from the actions of the Government regarding energy supply, particularly in the last year.

The other thing that we have not heard from the Minister of State, and it is quite surprising when he has come to the floor of the House to request that this additional fossil fuel generation be implemented, is an acknowledgement or mention of our climate targets and the impact this additional generation will have on us meeting our targets. In the Joint Committee on Environment and Climate Action today we discussed the sectoral emissions ceilings. It is incredibly ironic that we spent the morning talking about that issue, while we are now coming in here and we are going to undermine many of the actions and efforts the country is trying to undertake in that regard by signing off on this emergency Bill. The fact that the Minister of State has not addressed this aspect and is not taking it into consideration is a real red flag for me. There are concerns in this regard.

I have mentioned before that when the Government is dealing with the areas of energy and how we are going to manage our security of supply, the focus of the Government is currently on individuals. It is always on individuals. The impost is on individuals to deal with it. When we are looking at our transport sectoral ceilings, we are talking about electric vehicles, EVs. When we are talking about household emissions, it is about retrofitting. The responsibility is always placed on the individual to solve this problem for the State. Yet the Government absolutely refuses to make the largest users of energy accountable for their energy use and also refuses to place any limitations on their energy use. This is unacceptable. When we are talking about data centres, we are talking about energy users that account for every single rural house in Ireland. Every single rural household in Ireland could go out and retrofit, and we will expect them to do so and it will be costly for many people and many will not be able easily to find the money to do it, and yet this is what the Government is expecting those households to do.

It would have been much fairer to have managed data centre requirements to ensure that those individuals would not have to spend the money to slow or reduce their emissions, and for the Government to have pointed at and focused on the real problem here, the big energy users. It is similar when it comes to EVs. We will expect people to pay a great deal of money to buy an EV. Many people will not have the money to do that. Instead of asking the data centres to control their energy usage or of controlling the energy usage of data centres, we are putting the responsibility on individuals to deal with this problem. Even in this Bill, because of the amount of energy that data centres are using, individual households will have to pay at least an extra €40 due to procurement of capacity. I do not understand how the Government’s focus can be on the individuals and not on where the real problem lies. When legislation and policy is being developed, I ask the Minister of State to bear this point in mind.

What we are seeing is the burden is being put on the wrong people.

The Social Democrats have tabled a number of amendments to the Bill. As it has been an expedited process and there has not been an opportunity to have the discussions we should have when developing legislation, I ask the Government take into account the amendments we will put forward. They are relatively simple and include a cap on the amount of energy, reporting mechanisms, and reducing the timeframe available so that the Government can control this process a lot better than has been done previously. There is also the moratorium on data centres, but to be honest, I reckon that horse has probably bolted. If we are at a point where we are now forking out hundreds of millions for generation capacity to deal with them, I imagine many of the data centres that were planned are already up and running. However, I ask that the Government consider and take on board the moratorium because we do not want to make the situation worse while we are in this emergency.

See this speech in context