Naoise Ó Muirí (Dublin Bay North, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

The blackout yesterday in Spain and Portugal was a jarring but very real reminder of the vulnerability of our energy systems. In five seconds, the Iberian power network lost 15 GW. That is about 60% of normal consumer demand there. By way of comparison, the peak that has been recorded in Ireland is 6 GW, so two and a half times the full consumption of Ireland went off that grid in five seconds. It is incredible that that happened. Rail and metro services stopped, traffic systems stopped, lights were not working and many other things went. Some 60 million people on that peninsula were impacted, directly or indirectly.

Power is back, more or less, but many questions remain, fundamental questions as to what caused the outage and whether it could happen here. We are not immune to extreme events. We saw what happened with Storm Éowyn, particularly in the west of Ireland, and the challenges getting power back. Communities were left off air for two weeks-plus as the ESB worked hard to get them back on stream. Researchers in the University of Galway warned recently that though Storm Éowyn caused significant damage, we were lucky. It could have been even worse. I do not think any event in recent years has highlighted the vulnerability we have, particularly in power, like Storm Éowyn, and it could have been much worse.

The Commission is saying there are lessons to be learned by the European Union from the blackout. I believe that, because it was an international impact, Spain has to give a detail report to the Commission within three months, setting out what happened, the impact and what steps Spain will take to ensure it does not happen again. We need to plug into that and see what changes we need to make, if any, on the Irish side to minimise the risk of this happening to us. We will have to do this again and again to build resilience into the network.

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