Lynn Boylan (Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

Cuirim fáilte roimh an Aire Stáit, and I welcome the women from the Liberties. I am a fellow Liberties woman, so it is great to see them in the Chamber.

I wish to raise the issue of the impact of increasing electricity demand on electricity costs for households. The focus over recent months in the cost-of-living crisis has been on the cost of energy and the cost of gas heating. In October 2022 there was an emergency EU regulation on an intervention to address high energy prices. It proposed a mandatory target for member states to reduce consumption of electricity during "peak hours" by 5%. The focus on peak hours is really important and justified because gas-fired power has the most significant impact on prices at this time. We know that gas is the issue around the war in Ukraine. The regulation states: "Natural gas-fired power plants are often needed to satisfy the demand for electricity when the demand is at its highest during the day." That is why, according to the European Commission, reducing demand peaks would "contribute to a reduced fuel consumption and [therefore] to a smoother repartition of demand across hours, impacting hourly market prices". In other words, in plain English, during times of peak demand, electricity providers often rely on additional power plants, including those powered by fossil fuels, to meet the increased electricity needs. If, therefore, we could bring down our demand peaks, there would be less reliance on those extra power plants, and that then would result in lower fuel consumption. When demand is evenly distributed, it lessens the need for costly measures to manage the peak demand, such as activating expensive backup power plants.

It is very obvious from what we see at EU level that the EU thinks there is a serious problem with peak demand and its impact on the cost of electricity and energy that households are paying. The Government says it has complied with the regulation, and that seems to be because, while I would not say there was a little bit of "cooking the books", it seems very odd to me that the target was set against projected electricity demand instead of looking at previous demand. Technically, we might have reached the 5% reduction in electricity demand, but what really matters is whether we have actually reduced absolute demand, and it is very clear we have not because the analysis carried out by Ember reveals that Ireland is the only EU country that has increased its electricity demand. We might have set a target for reducing demand by 5% but, because we chose a baseline of projected electricity demand as opposed to what the demand was in the previous year, we will now technically reach the target without having reduced our electricity demand.

What is the Government doing to reduce overall electricity demand in this country? How many people are employed in the Department to look at this? I am not talking about demand-side reduction, whereby data centres power down when there is pressure on the grid; I am talking about how this country is addressing and reducing its absolute electricity demand. It does not take a genius to work out why Ireland is an outlier and why we cannot reduce our electricity demand. It is because electricity consumption by data centres increased by 32% between 2020 and 2021, and between January to March 2015 and October to December 2021, there was a 265% increase in electricity demand. That is why we are going in the wrong direction when we talk about reducing our overall electricity demand in this country.