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

It is essential we do both. The most recent statement about what happened last year shows the benefit of that approach. As I said, we are slightly better positioned than we were last year because our demand has not grown by as much as EirGrid had expected because of efficiency measures applied in a variety of ways. We focus first on energy efficiency in everything we do. That is absolutely the case.

Last year saw a significant reduction in emissions from the power sector. We will get the figures in due course. What has driven that? Shutting down Tarbert and allowing much less running time for Moneypoint has driven it. That has to be the future. The strategy cannot be to rely on heavy emitting plants to meet our energy capacity needs. That will not work. We have to switch off coal next year and only have such plants as an absolute last-case backup in the event of all other systems being unavailable. That is not our strategy.

We need to look at what is working and what worked last year particularly was that the existing interconnectors allowed us to draw in power at times when the wind was not blowing here. That helped to reduce emissions and gave us greater security of supply. The introduction of new interconnection with the UK this year and with France in two years' time, and further interconnection, rather than reliance on heavy emitting base load power plants that are running all the time, as well as renewables and efficiency, will be the cornerstone of our security future.

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