Pa Daly (Kerry, Sinn Fein)

The large energy users the Minister of State is talking about are relatively getting off the hook and they are pushing up household bills. In a confidential memo recently released to us under a freedom of information, FOI, request, the Secretary General of the Department of public expenditure warned that soaring electricity demand, largely attributable to data centres, is forcing the State to spend heavily on new power generation and grid upgrades. As the grid is paid for through network charges, this is inevitably leading to surging household bills.

A single data centre can use as much as electricity as the whole city of Kilkenny. The memo also pointed out that data centres were a risk to energy security, to the extent that there is need to “direct Government intervention in the electricity market to purchase generation capacity on an emergency, non-market basis”. All of this is going to have to be paid by the taxpayer through electricity bills, leading to a disproportionate and unfair burden on households. Not only is this unstainable, it is also regressive. Price review 6, as the Minister of State mentioned, represents the perfect opportunity to right this wrong, but the draft decision, unfortunately, seems to extend it further. Will the Minister of State commit to doing something about it to alleviate the burden?

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