Timmy Dooley (Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

I welcome the Minister to the House for the debate on this important issue. He rightly concentrated his remarks on energy security on the electricity market. There is not an issue with oil and gas, other than the price of them at the moment, which is clearly as a result of what has happened during the pandemic. A lot of supply lines across a range of commodities are impacted by that.

The recent media reports that we were facing a potential series of blackouts was a considerable shock to many. I do not want to be alarmist, but the language suggested that we were getting very close to that. As the Minister put it, the risk of potential outages had increased. Even though I have followed the issue in the committee in recent years and I have raised it with different stakeholders in that time, nobody ever seemed to raise any real concern. I am somewhat surprised about that and I wonder if the Minister is too. The stated intention of decarbonising the electricity network as part of decarbonising the economy was aimed at a much greater usage of electricity and the various projections that had been made around that, such as moving away from fossil fuels to power cars and trying to get up to 1 million electric vehicles on the road by a certain date. We have targets for the retrofitting of homes and the installation of heat pumps. The ambition and targets were there. What I am surprised about is that it became an issue all of a sudden for those that have a responsibility in this regard. It was not necessarily overnight, but it had not been brought to the attention of the wider public. I wonder if it had been brought to the attention of the Government at an earlier stage to try to find a policy response.There are two issues in respect of electricity, which are the capacity to generate electricity to meet peak demand and the very considerable constraints on the grid. I remember I raised this with EirGrid a number of years ago at a committee meeting, because I was hearing of companies that, based on where they were located and where demand had increased, had to effectively supply their own electricity behind the meter. I raised that as an issue at the time because I thought it was rather bizarre that large companies were effectively generating electricity on site to meet their needs. It did not seem to be good overall policy for a country that was ultimately going to transfer much of its energy needs to electricity to have this patchwork quilt of a grid that, quite frankly, was not fit for purpose.

I know there are issues. It is a bit like trying to generate wind onshore. Nobody wants wind turbines in their backyard any more and it seems nobody wants grid infrastructure either. Notwithstanding all the developments that are in place, I do not know of anyone, or have heard anybody talk about, delivering electricity by Wi-Fi. We are going to need wires and poles for quite some time. Our cell phones are now powered by leaving them on chargers without a direct wire connection. It is a stated ambition of some of the car companies that, ultimately, as cars pass over certain strips on the road an induction current will, hopefully, recharge the batteries, but that is a long way off. The grid is an issue, which I am sure the Minister is well aware of and which he may speak about later.

On the supply side, the ESB has a very considerable ambition to develop offshore wind generation capacity off the Clare coast and into the Atlantic. That has very real potential for a positive impact on the economy, but we are looking at that ten years hence. There are certain impediments to foreshore licensing and legislation has to change, but if the Government was to take a very proactive approach, what more could we do to bring on that kind of renewable energy from that source more quickly? If an ambition and target was set to do it within five years, is it possible? Some of the technology is nascent and in development, especially the very large floating pontoons that are required. This is technology that is in development, but people glaze over when they hear that it is ten years away. It is potentially two or, at worst, three electoral cycles away and who knows who will be in power by then? Can we bring some of these proposals to fruition more quickly to benefit the economy as is necessary?