Timmy Dooley: Defends State-Owned Gas Storage

Thanks very much, Ascahaillach, for giving me an opportunity to respond to the strongly held views of Benny and the opposition. There's a bit of divergence between some of them and I must respect that too. They're strongly held and we might argue over the detail but just in general what I'd want to reflect about this bill is I think Minister O'Brien and I have set forward it's purely about energy security. We all, maybe we don't all accept, but a lot of people in this house and in society generally accept that we need to transition away for a couple of reasons. We need to transition away from our dependence on imported fossil fuels. There's the climate emissions targets and that which generally is an important, is recognised as an important aspect of it. But also, and it reflects on what Deputy Healy Ray has just said, I might have a difference of opinion about how we get there but I know what he's talking about in terms of the cost of energy. And it's my strongly held view and the government's strongly held view that if you bring more of renewables onto the grid from our own resources, from wind and solar within our own remit, we'll reduce our dependence on imported fossil fuels and that will ultimately reduce the price and will benefit all across the country. And then for those who are looking at it slightly differently or from a different angle in terms of the reduction in the CO2 emissions and the impact that that's having on climate change, the fact that this is not going to be gas traded into the marketplace, it's a storage facility that's there in the event of a rupture or a disruption to the supply through the interconnectors from the North Sea via the UK via Scotland, and principally it's storage. It's state-owned, it's state-controlled and it's not a market initiative. So it's not an attempt to use LNG as a price lever to compete with the supplies that are already there. It's not aimed at creating a market tension that would reduce price and therefore make us more dependent. So it's really just about storage. So therefore, I don't understand where you're coming from, but it doesn't and won't add to one extra element of CO2 emissions. In the event of there being a disruption, it will replace gas that would already have been provided into the market. And it's about critical infrastructure. It's about ensuring that our hospitals and our key facilities that are dependent on gas, principally for heat, are able to continue to do that for whatever length of time it might take to repair the supply line. I take the points that have been made too about, you know, and I think both Deputy Murphy and Deputy Hern talked about it, why is it this legislation that's being rushed through in an emergency way? We're already making very significant headway in relation to our plan-led approach to the capture of wind off our shoreline. We've had the recent designation through the DMAP process off the southeast coast. We had a very successful auction there when other countries that are attempting to capture wind off their shorelines or in their seas, where they've been unable to get bidders. We had three or four bidders for the auction in December. 900 megawatts has been secured. It's now gone through the final permission part of that. And that process is working really well. There are three other suitable locations within that overall designated area. They will go to auction soon and we see a supply of interest there from other companies. And the government is working really hard. Minister O'Brien and I and others are regularly in contact with the marketplace to encourage that investment, to show that Ireland has a long-term plan in place. We're now working on a national DMAP or a national designation of more suitable sites around our coastline that will generate or that has the capacity to generate up to 15 gigawatts of electricity out to 2040. And that's the kind of approach we're now taking. So I think it's, I understand the politics of it, but it's unfair to say that we're ignoring the opportunity in renewables. But in doing that and recognising that that is slow, we're de-risking it for those investors that will come in. We're doing the mapping, we're collecting the data and we'll be providing it as part of the auction process to those entities and through those auctions. And rather than the phase one projects, which were effectively developer-led, we've moved to take control. So that work's already done and we're working through it. But it would be foolhardy to just say, because we have a plan to capture effectively 20 gigawatts of wind energy and some additional solar onshore out to 2040, we can somehow ignore the necessity to store gas as we transition away from the use of fossil fuels. And I get and understand what both Deputies Ahern and Murphy said about battery storage. And yes, it's there, but not sufficient in the short term. You talk about other liquid fuels and we are, I mean, the Department of Government is working on a strategy, a hydrogen strategy, so that we are working towards identifying other solutions. Because the ESB recently published a report which effectively said to get to net zero by 2050. We can't do that with just renewables alone. We'll have to use liquid fuels and of course hydrogen would be the obvious one in that mix. And that creates huge opportunities because we will have a quantum of electricity generated from renewables that won't, you know, generally the wind blows better at night when the demand is less. And rather than grounding that electricity or grounding it or not utilising it, that electricity can be used to effectively convert it to hydrogen or ammonia in a more stable way. There's opportunities for export there as well as storage. So that's the longer term plan and work is being done on that. I accept that there's an investment in infrastructure, but I don't accept the point that was made that we're locking ourselves in. I think if we had gone ahead and sort of put this out to the marketplace and asked for outside investment to come in in a market-driven initiative where you were building hard infrastructure, I think that accusation would stand. In this instance I don't. I can't accept that because it's a floating piece of kit. It's a floating piece of infrastructure. Yes, there will be some onshore infrastructure to be built relatively minor in overall terms and overall cost terms. The big element of this is the ship and its location. And when we get to a point that we don't need that backup storage, that we've either enough batteries in place or we have enough, we're generating enough electricity to be able to look to hydrogen storage, well then we can move that fossil fuel piece of kit on to another location or dispense with it or sunset it. I suppose one of the other things that I'd want to mention in more general terms too, and I think it'll arise in some of the other amendments, this bill is about moving really quickly on the permissions that are necessary to get the infrastructure in place. The operation will come, as I said, at the second stage in a bill which, you see the heads of the bill, and some of the amendments are some of what you're trying to stitch in here, I feel might be better addressed in the context of that. This is just about permissions. So hopefully that will give you an understanding in terms of what the government is doing from our perspective. So we're not in a position to accept the amendments that are proposed here.