Jerry Buttimer (Cork South-Central, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

I thank Deputy Ó Muirí for raising the matter, which I am taking on behalf of the Minister. The Deputy is right that we are not immune to extreme events and he rightly illustrated and highlighted our vulnerability in terms of 2.5 times our usage having gone in five seconds. He is bang on. It is important to note that we do not yet know the causes of yesterday’s event. This kind of cascading event has happened to power grids before. We remember the north-east of the US in 2003, when 55 million people were affected, in particular in New York, and more recently in Chile in February of this year, when the vast majority of the 19 million customers lost electricity for a number of hours.

EirGrid regularly tests the resilience of our grid to extreme events such as these as part of National Emergency Co-ordination Group emergency exercises. EirGrid’s recently published generation adequacy assessment shows a significant reduction in risks from recent years. This substantial improvement is in large part due to the mitigations from the Commission for Regulation of Utilities-led programme of actions to ensure security of electricity supply.

New temporary emergency generation capacity has now been delivered in four locations, namely, North Wall and Huntstown in Dublin, Shannonbridge, County Offaly, and Tarbert, County Kerry. Additionally, Moneypoint power station is converting from coal to heavy fuel oil and has been contracted to remain open until 2029 as an “out of market” unit to provide power only when required by the system operator for electricity security. Moreover, a number of power generation projects have been delivered over the last few years, including capacity market projects, renewables and a new 500 MW interconnector to Great Britain that began operation this year.

It is important to note that conventional generation is still critical for the secure operation of a power system. The spinning motion of conventional fossil fuel generation provides inertia to the system that can protect frequency oscillations from cascading through the system and causing other generators to trip off. EirGrid is already taking a range of actions to ensure our system security during the energy transition. It is also continuing to assess how it can securely integrate further variable renewables at any one time. For example, EirGrid is procuring low carbon inertia services to replace the need for running conventional generation in a highly renewable grid. Ireland has successfully implemented up to 75% variable renewables sources on the grid at any one time and these inertia services will allow us to go further.

The Department has also commissioned the International Energy Agency to conduct a study of our electricity security in the context of our energy transition to 2035. This study will be focused on the role of the power sector in achieving that secure transition. It will help Ireland to plan the integration of power sector planning within the wider energy sector as we electrify heat, transport and industry. Furthermore, it will provide an independent internationally peer reviewed assessment of what Ireland needs as we move to a highly renewables system to ensure both security of supply, that is, whether we have enough supply to meet demand and system security, that is, the ability of the electricity system to retain a normal state or to return to a normal state after any type of event as soon as possible. The Department expects to receive a copy of this report before the end of the year and will publish it thereafter.

Deputy Ó Muirí's points are well made and I will bring his concerns back to the Minister. I congratulate Deputy Ó Muirí on his appointment as Chair of a committee and I wish him well in his term ahead.

See this speech in context