Eamon Ryan (Dublin Bay South, Green Party)
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My Department is currently finalising its review of security of energy supply of Ireland’s electricity and natural gas systems. The review is focused on the period to 2030, but in the context of ensuring a sustainable transition to a net zero economy by 2050. The Government’s policy objectives are to ensure energy is affordable, sustainable, and secure, as well as in line with Ireland’s climate targets and statutory carbon budgets. Underpinned by these objectives, the review is considering the risks to both natural gas and electricity supplies, and a range of mitigation measures, including the need for additional capacity of indigenous renewable energy but also energy imports, energy storage, fuel diversification, demand side response and renewable gases such as hydrogen. To support its development, a detailed technical analysis has been published and an extensive consultation process carried out, providing important insights from over 450 individuals and organisations on the range of options that could be implemented to support Ireland’s security of supply framework.

The McCarthy review into security of supply of the electricity system has been a further key input informing the analysis and will be published alongside the completion of the review. The completion of that review is a key priority. Once the review is completed, which I expect to be next month, when it will also be published, I will bring my recommendations to Government. Subject to Government approval, as I said, it will be published at that time.

Eamon Ryan (Dublin Bay South, Green Party)
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It is my position. As Minister, I have to look at all three. As policymakers, we must all do so.

Climate must come first because there is the physical reality that we cannot avoid the risk of passing various tipping points. We have to stay within certain limits. Those limits are set by physics and the meteorological system. They cannot vary. There is a real limit on the environmental side. When it comes to providing security or competitiveness, there are always a variety of different ways by which that can be done, for example, by being more efficient, switching to renewables and looking at a range of different strategies. In my mind, it is the case that the sustainability criteria within the trilemma does have pre-eminence.

If you look at what has been done in the past year in response to the energy security problems we did have, you can see that the real benefit is that we are delivering new additional backup power that complements our move towards a zero-carbon system. I refer to power generation at the North Wall, in Aghada, Shannonbridge, Tarbert and by all the projects we legislated for here on an emergency development basis. We are building those and we are delivering them. You do not ignore security; you have to provide for it. That is being done by means of the actions to which I refer.

Eamon Ryan (Dublin Bay South, Green Party)
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First, it is intended to publish the Dermot McCarthy review in conjunction with the energy security review. It was decided to put back that publication at that time because it is appropriate that his work complements the other work that is being done.

In terms of lessons, there are lessons to be learned from that. One of the things to recognise is that the development of the new capacity auction system was among the first examples of how European legislation approached this. It was only in 2017 and 2018 that the approach that was outlined by Europe was agreed. This was the first iteration. It was useful and we have to learn from that. There are technical examples. A learning may be, for example, how tolerant would one be in the area of security or of a loss of load. Going from memory, our figure was something like eight hours per annum, whereas some other neighbouring jurisdictions had lower. We will look at that as an example of how willing we should be or what sort of parameters we should set in terms of security. The wider sense is that we did not pay sufficient attention to potential security problems. We will have to provide additional investment to make sure that in future we do not see a repeat of that possibility.