Dáil debates

Wednesday, 29 June 2022

EirGrid, Electricity and Turf (Amendment) Bill 2022: Committee and Remaining Stages

 

3:37 pm

Photo of Darren O'RourkeDarren O'Rourke (Meath East, Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

I echo many of those comments and sentiments from Deputy Smith. We have an amendment grouped with this. I entirely agree that the suggestion that data centres are not a significant part of the issue is complete spin and nonsense. It is disingenuous for anyone to make that statement. In fairness to the Minister of State who was here last night, he pointed to three main reasons we are where we are. One was the non-delivery of previously contracted capacity. We have heard from CRU. CRU had lessons to learn. There should be some investigation into CRU and how it has failed to deliver that capacity and has underestimated demand by almost a factor of four. There are questions to be answered in that regard. Again, this is an issue within the control of Government.

The second point was increasing electricity demand. From where is a significant amount of that increase in electricity demand coming other than data centres? We know that data centres increased their demand by 144% between 2015 and 2020. That figure is from the Central Statistics Office, CSO, not made up by the Opposition for some political reasons. In 2021 alone, data centre demand increased by a further 32%, which puts their usage at about 14% higher than the entire demand from residences in rural Ireland and a significant percentage of all residences in Ireland, including in urban spaces. Data centres are a central part of the consideration.

How we have ended up in this position is a complete misalignment, a failure of policy to match demand with supply. We have runaway demand championed by Governments. Whatever hope we had for a Green Party in government calling a halt and trying to introduce some sense on the issue, we can put paid to after what we heard last night. Going by the Dáil record, the greatest cheerleaders for this data centre policy are among high levels within the Green Party. That tells us everything we need to know about that party.

The amendment we have submitted calls for a pause until such time as the State makes its mind up about what role data centres are going to play, where they should be, what is a reasonable demand to put on our State relative to others, and what role if any they can play in balancing the energy grid. This is about ensuring we have a supply that can match the demand and that does not run the risk of bringing us to a cliff edge or crisis, because this is emergency legislation. Some people tried to deny that last night but it is. It is being rushed through because there is an impending crisis, one successive Governments have managed us towards, and now the Government is seeking the support of the Opposition to bail them out and to look the other way. That is what we are being asked to do.

I ask the Minister to support the Sinn Féin amendment and the others in a similar vein because they make sense. In fact, it is the prudent and sensible thing to do. Our amendment provides for an opportunity to reflect on the current state of affairs and where our energy system might go. We have projections from the Department itself. In March, the Renewable Electricity Corporate Power Purchase Agreements Roadmap was published and it projects the estimated electricity demand in Ireland out to 2030. Residential, commercial and industrial demand stay pretty static between here and 2030 but data centres increase year on year. That is from the Minister's Department, so to suggest this crisis has not been significantly contributed to, if not precipitated, by data centres is a deliberate manoeuvre on behalf of senior figures in Government who should and, I believe, do know better.

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