Barry Ward (Dún Laoghaire, Fine Gael)

I welcome this Bill. It is a hugely important piece of infrastructural progress. I welcome the fact it has come to us as quickly as it has, making good on a commitment in the programme for Government. I recognise that the Bills Office and the Minister of State’s Department turned it around in quite a short period of time. I also recognise the pre-legislative scrutiny done by my party colleague Deputy Naoise Ó Muirí and his committee. I welcome the fact the Bill has progressed quickly and is here. It does some important things.

I have listened to the debate and heard the criticism from many colleagues, but let us get down to brass tacks. This Bill is about providing the electricity infrastructure that we need to build houses to start to erode the deficit in housing provision. If we do not do this, we will not be able to do it. It is that simple. This is an absolutely necessary measure to allow the ESB to put in place the electricity infrastructure that is going to allow houses to come on stream faster and across the whole country. If there was no other reason to welcome this Bill, that would be a good reason to welcome it. I hope the ESB and EirGrid will be able to do that as fast as possible.

I listened to the debate and heard the criticism of, for example, electricity prices. I join with those Deputies. I do not understand why the Commission for Regulation of Utilities has allowed electricity prices to go up as far as they have. I understand there was a peak in generation costs at the time of the outbreak of the Ukraine war. That is no longer there. In fact, with 40% of our electricity generation coming from renewables, I do not understand why we have not dealt with that problem.

We talk about it in the context of the budget and whether or not we should have targeted measures or ongoing supports. Leaving that debate entirely to one side, there is a simple solution to this, and it is to tackle the energy companies about the cost of electricity. It is unjustifiable. Maybe I do not understand and there may be a perfectly good reason, but I have not heard it yet. In the absence of such a reason, we should be going back to the CRU and asking it to explain why it has allowed electricity prices to become as inflated as they have, particularly in the context of our European neighbours. I do not really understand why we have allowed ourselves to become an outlier in that regard. The cost of electricity is something that I hope can be addressed when the infrastructural deficit is addressed by this investment.

Mention has also been made of microgeneration, something that Ireland has been absolutely behind the curve on. Households all over this country are willing to use solar panels or other ways of microgeneration including geothermal, but they are not facilitated by the network to do that in real terms. While it may be technically possible to put electricity back into the grid, there is no real incentive to do it. The unit price that a householder gets for putting it back is negligible even compared with the wholesale price of electricity. That is not going to encourage people to use the facilities at their disposal to feed the electricity generated within their homes, farms, businesses or wherever it might be back into the network to contribute to the overall amount of electricity available.

The other issue I have heard people refer to, including Deputy Gogarty, is long-duration energy storage. That is something that could definitely be a target of infrastructure spending. When we put the target together for the number of electric vehicles on the road, one of the big pluses for me was that we would have cars charging overnight, drawing electricity from the grid and essentially being a national battery for electricity that could then be used during the day when there is a greater demand on the grid. These mobile batteries would be there, having absorbed the excess energy available overnight. I do not know what plans the ESB has for large-scale long-duration electricity storage, but where we have good renewables, particularly in wind, we should be taking that energy and making sure it is there when there is a need for it on an ongoing basis. I would welcome any news the Minister of State might have on the plans within this infrastructure development to increase long-duration electricity storage.

The other issue raised was data centres. I join with my colleagues in their concern about the extent that data centres are gobbling up electricity. I do not agree that we should have a moratorium, but I do not understand why every data centre in this country is not covered in solar panels to begin with. To the greatest extent possible, they should be doing what they can to ensure they are using renewable electricity. I recognise that when they take electricity from the grid, it might be renewable electricity, but they are using electricity that could be used by somebody else, who is then relying on electricity that is not renewable. The greatest concern I have about data centres is that when they do not get enough electricity from the grid, they are relying on on-site diesel generators to feed their electricity needs. That has to be worst possible way to generate electricity, particularly on the small scale of a data centre. We need to take steps as a Government to ensure that data centres are ideally not doing that at all, but certainly to the very minimum extent possible.

Finally, I will make a point on the construction of this Bill. The principal Act referred to in the Bill is the Electricity (Supply) (Amendment) Act 1954. As I understand it, that Act has been amended 20 times since then. When you pick up the Electricity (Supply) (Amendment) Bill 2025 and look at it, it is illegible. Section 2 will say that section 4 of the principal Act is amended by amending the reference to €12 billion to a reference to €17 billion. When you are reading the Bill, that means nothing. It means nothing in isolation. Section 4 has been amended over and over again. In order to understand what this Bill actually says, you have to go back and dig up 20 different pieces of legislation to actually understand section 4 of this new amendment Bill. Why do we not take the original section 4, repeal it or restate it in the new Bill so that somebody reading the legislation can know what it does? Of course, you can read briefing documents, but legislation should be accessible to people. They should not have to trawl through years and years of legislation to find out what it means.

See this speech in context