Timmy Dooley (Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

I welcome the Minister of State to the House and I welcome this Bill. It is necessary when one considers what the energy sector has experienced since the invasion of Ukraine by Russia, as well as the impact that has had on world fossil fuel prices. It is appropriate that those companies that have had significant gains and no increases in their costs would be made accountable and made to contribute to the State. The State, on behalf of its citizens, has done a really good job in attempting to ensure that energy remains affordable, insofar as it can be, to assist people with the heating of homes, moving around in the economy and getting on with daily life.

Notwithstanding the difficulties we have with Opposition parties and differences of position on so many issues, there is a fairly widespread acceptance that this Government has stood with the people. It has been imaginative and creative in finding solutions to the really difficult problems that have been foisted on the Government as a result of the invasion of Ukraine by Russia, as well as the impact that has had not just on supply chains but, particularly, on the cost of energy. With the passage of time and when history is written, all political parties will come out of this looking well, including Opposition parties, which have been cautious and mindful in their responses to the decisions that have had to be taken.

However, this points to an area in which the Minister of State and I have a particular interest, namely, the necessity to move away from fossil fuels as quickly as possible. We must wean ourselves off that problem, which is bedevilling our environment and our society. We must get to a greater reliance and dependence on the offshore opportunity to capture of wind for the generation of electricity to power our economy into the future. The quicker we can do that the better.

The Minister of State knows about the plans the ESB has with others to develop an offshore wind farm off the west coast of County Clare. That will bring great potential for Ireland in terms of green, clean energy. It will potentially bring the benefit of storable and transportable fuel. I am referring to the project around hydrogen, as well as the potential for ammonia, which are more storable and transportable fuels. The opportunities are endless.

This gives us an opportunity for the first time in a long time to look with ambition at addressing the carbon emissions from the aviation sector. Aviation is hugely important to County Clare, Shannon Airport and the mid-west region, not just from a domestic jobs perspective, but also because of the benefits tourism brings. However, aviation has been off the agenda in the carbon emissions debate for a long time. We are looking at land use, agriculture, retrofitting of homes, etc. However, we have had to turn a blind eye to aviation. With the advances now in sustainable aviation fuel development and hydrogen and ammonia being the constituent part of that, I see real opportunities. I see a real positive for the environment in reaching targets as we head to 2050. I also see a real opportunity for Ireland to be at the cutting edge of the development of sustainable aviation fuels.

I am pleased that the Technological University of the Shannon, TUS, which is based in Limerick and was previously known as the RTC, and UL, together with Trinity College Dublin, are working through their chemistry departments and other units to develop that sustainable aviation fuel sector. That is something we should be championing much more, as we should the offshore potential I have spoken about, which has the capacity not just to power our domestic economy. If we get more clever about our interconnectors to Europe, we could provide a very long-term sustainable supply of electricity. While electricity cannot be stored, there is also the matter of what can be done with batteries, as well as hydrogen, as I have said.

Another innovative Irish company, Supernode, is developing a technology that can be part of the future super grid for Europe. They are developing a high-tech piece of infrastructure. It is effectively a cable that allows electricity to be transferred at very low temperatures. It is known as a "superconnectivity". Therefore, for far less use of copper, and through those proprietary cables they are developing, one can get a greater transfer of electricity. Ireland is quickly becoming seen as an innovator in this space.It is long overdue because, quite frankly, we have some of the best renewable resources off our western and southern seaboards. We do not have the sunniest climate, but with the technologies that are being developed and the reduction in the cost of solar technologies, we can be and we can use solar as a contributor to our decarbonisation. Work on this is being done at Government level.

We have to join the whole lot up. We have to look at the supergrid and the technologies SuperNode is developing to see how that can play a role in making Ireland accessible to the rest of Europe to sell our clean energy. We must then look at how we can use that domestically to power our economy now and into the future.

We get many comments about data centres. It is often pushed back that data centres are a luxury or nice to have, and that all they are doing really is storing social media accounts. That is not the case. Quite frankly, data centres are what filing cabinets were in the offices of the 1970s. We used to talk about advanced factories and offices with underfloor cabling and raised floors. The latter were seen as the new normal for office buildings. Those offices will not exist anymore. People are working from home. They are working in smaller clusters. So much of our lives now involves accessing data from the cloud. It is not about the storage of silly videos or kids playing games. That is part of it for sure, but it is not the main part of it. When I hear people suggesting that we should somehow be looking at reducing the number of data centres because of the potential for electricity shortages, I find it bizarre. Effectively, we are telling the outside world that the economy of the future is not for us and to go somewhere else. We have to get real. There will be a significant impact on the environment in the short term, so we really do have to power ahead, pardon the pun, with repowering our economy through clean energies.