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

Not meaning to be rude, but I checked on my phone the EirGrid dashboard, which we all look at, I am sure, on a regular basis. One can see wind power is providing 55% of our needs as we speak.

The Deputy is absolutely right. Increasingly, there are moments - we have seen it in the past month or six weeks - where the scale of the wind power resource available to us is beyond compare. Particularly in the middle of the night, that power, which is effectively coming in at almost a zero marginal cost as prices are very low in the wholesale market in those time periods, finds it difficult to find a home or a use. We need to do everything, both on the domestic scale in the likes of this project but also among big industrial and other users, to switch our demand to those periods when the wind is blowing strongest, particularly in the middle of the night. In that way, we can save emissions and save householders much expenditure. The benefit for the energy system is that the curtailment cost at present, where we have power available but we do not have demand for it, was the most significant reason our bid recently in the auction system went up higher than we expected. The curtailment of constraints on what is a very high renewable system now in many instances is costing us. Using that so that one keeps the costs down and one keeps the energy suppliers paid rather than the curtailment of their power is absolutely the future direction we need to go in.

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