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

I thank the Deputy. The answer indicates the Department of housing has no plans to introduce more specific guidelines on how solar farms should be developed. The Deputy asked about that. The Department is saying it is bringing in regional capacity allocations. In other words, these are projections for the amount of solar power we have produced in each region of Ireland. Those are to be used to flow down to county development plans and so on. There is a path for predicting how much solar energy will be generated and the national planning framework will be used to make planning decisions. It does specify the quantum.

The Deputy asked about the quality of land that is being used and whether it should be high or low quality. I do not believe there are guidelines on that.

The Deputy also asked about curtailment and, specifically, how much money has been paid out in compensation payments as a result of curtailment. This is straying from his original question but I am happy to find him an answer. This will not be from the Department of housing but, rather, from the Minister, Deputy Eamon Ryan, in his capacity as Minister with responsibility for energy. Curtailment is solved by having a better grid and better subsea connections to other countries in order that we can balance our grid better. We are putting greater strain on the grid all of the time by changing the nature of it. We used to have a very small number of generators that generated power and it all flowed in one direction. Now electricity is flowing in both directions and we are adding 100 extra homes every day which are generating their own solar power and sending it back up the grid in another direction. Clearly, the grid is changing from a hierarchy or tree into a network arrangement. We are planning to connect all of our 37 GW of offshore wind, all of which will place additional strain on the grid. That requires billions of euro of investment by EirGrid, as is the case across Europe. There is a Europe-wide plan to invest billions of euro in every country to strengthen the grid and that is part of climate action and the electrification of the grid. EirGrid's future capacity statements are published every year and Deputy Stanton can see whether he considers that they have a reasonable and credible path to the future.

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