Ossian Smyth (Dún Laoghaire, Green Party) | Oireachtas source

I fully agree that we need to accelerate our deployment of renewable energy, and with the Ukraine war, suddenly there has been a new focus whereby other countries in Europe have said they need to accelerate theirs as well. The Council of the European Union sat down and decided we needed to bring in a new package, known as RePower EU, that will involve greater ambition on the level of renewables that can be deployed. Part of that plan will involve sourcing fossil fuel energy from countries other than Russia and to find other means to do that, and also to reduce the period in which it takes to obtain planning permission for renewable energy, to between one and two years. The Council wants EU countries to designate special areas as faster areas for renewable energy and we are going to take part in that. I am sorry it did not happen sooner. If I had been involved, it would have, as the Senator can imagine.

The Senator mentioned the possibility of reusing an LNG terminal for the export of hydrogen. There are two basic types of terminals, namely, import and export terminals. We are looking at developing an export terminal in the form of liquid ammonia, which could be used by other countries that might need it. Ammonia is more energy dense than hydrogen and presents a more feasible solution.

There is no silver bullet for energy, as the Senator noted. We need a combination rather than having all our eggs in one energy basket. We need the diversity, strength and resilience that comes from using multiple sources of energy in order that if one of them is unavailable or very expensive or if it fails for some reason related to the weather, we will have a back-up of these different systems. Combined with that, we need good grid connections interconnecting us with other countries. We are developing the Celtic interconnector to connect our grid to France, we have multiple connections to the UK and we are looking at other countries as well.