If you divide 700 into 500, you get about 70 per cent. It is 728 into 513 or 513 over 728—whatever fraction that is. That is so far as generating capacity is concerned. I am on that at the moment and I shall talk about the financial end later on. That figure of 476,000 kilowatts means working at about 65 per cent. I know that the Minister says you could get in an exceptional year both a wet summer when you would have no turf and a dry winter when you would have no water, but in a wet summer, you would have plenty of water for generating so you would have something which you would have not in a dry summer—if those two things came together. And it would be an extraordinary coincidence if it happened here, because I think it extremely unlikely that you would have a long, wet summer and then by some miracle of Providence, a long, dry winter, a very unlikely thing to happen in this country indeed, with our average of 40 inches of rainfall spread over the whole year.
There is one other method. There are various ways of getting at this matter of whether the proposals in the Bill are reasonable or not. I can revert to the balance sheet of the E.S.B., the total assets of the E.S.B. in their balance sheet of March 31st, 1960, the last one. These include, do not forget, items other than electricity generating plant and transmission lines. They include things like sundry credits, reserve for contingencies and so on. The capital total in the balance sheet is £117,577,000— let us call it £118,000,000. What is the total part of our one hundred million pounds which the E.S.B. have already power to spend to make capital investment? There is £100,000,000, plus £30,000,000 for rural electrification, so that on 31st March the position was in fact that £118,000,000 had been spent out of a total of £130,000,000.
But remember, if practically all the authorised capital for rural electrification was spent there was a huge chunk of capital available for further expenditure on generating capacity. I cannot, of course, give an accurate figure, but unless there has been astounding expenditure—and I doubt if there has —in recent months, I cannot understand why the figure the Board will require say in the next reasonable period of years should be anything like the sum of an additional £20,000,000. What I would put to the Minister is that I think the Board have enough money to cover capital expenditure for two years and in giving the Minister £10,000,000, I was giving him two more years on top; I was providing the Minister with all the money that should be required up to the end of 1964. It is just possible that that might do the Minister.
There is another way of getting it if he is worried—several ways. The capital invested by the E.S.B. on generation plant and transmission lines was at 31st March, 1960, £108,000,000, according to the last annual report of the Board of Directors. But £26,000,000 of this related to rural electrification, so that the amount for generation transmission and so on, which is the money required in this section which I want to amend, at 31st of March, 1960, was £82,000,000; so that at 31st of March, on that basis, there was £18,000,000 left. I do not mind being frank. I do not understand how it came about or what the considerations involved were, but I should be glad of the Minister's explanation of his statement in his brief to us the week before last that the existing authority will be used up by 31st of March, 1961; that is to say, if my reading of this is correct, and I think it is, the Electricity Supply Board will have spent in the financial year 1960-61 on generation and on transmission lines, other than rural electrification, a sum of £18,000,000.
Again in fairness to the Minister, I think he changed his emphasis on the last occasion in the House. In his main brief in the Seanad debate on 30th November, 1960, he said at column 180:
It is, on occasion, suggested that the Board has an excess of generating capacity. I could deal with this suggestion at some length but it should be sufficient to refer to the annual reports of the Board for the last two years which indicate that, in 1958-59, due to shortage of both turf and water and in 1959-60 due to shortage of water alone, it was necessary to draw on the Pigeon House Station which is the stand-by station of last resort.
That leaves one with the impression that the Pigeon House is an old station, but it has been modernised and is a normal station now. Why it should be called "the stand-by station of last resort," I do not know, except to create an impression that the generators were scraping the bottom of the barrel to the very limit of their capacity.
The Minister gave a different impression in his reply at column 219, and I think his statement then was a good deal more correct. He said:
I have been supplied with figures by the Board whose chairman has my confidence, which showed that every single station at one time or another of the year is working at 100 per cent. capacity.
Certainly you can plug them in in turn. There is the point, of course, that the stations must be repaired occasionally, but anybody who did elementary physics—it is a long time since I did it myself—knows that there are no engines in this world that last so long as electrical turbines and generators. There are no engines to compare with electric motors. Their life is colossal compared with that of other machinery. And, of course, if you want to repair one and put in new turbines, say, at the Shannon where there are old turbines, you can do them one at a time, for they are in series.
I am not saying that the Minister has no case, but I think he has altogether exaggerated his case. I want to assure the Minister, and I hope he will appreciate it, that this is a deadly serious amendment. I believe it will provide for the requirements for the next four years, that is, up to 31st March, 1965, and I think that is a reasonable measure to give to a body like the Electricity Supply Board. Once the Oireachtas passes this Bill, all control over expenditure by a body like the Electricity Supply Board is gone. It goes into the hands of the managers. I do not want any inference to be drawn that I am condemning the way the Board has done its business. There is nothing like that involved, but there is a principle involved in this, that Parliament does not make available large sums of money for the repayment of which the people will be responsible, without being fully informed and without being convinced that the moneys are really necessary. That is the essence of my amendment.
I could make a number of other points about it, but I believe that I am giving the Minister enough money to last for four years, and I say that this is all the figures add up to. The fact is that there is an increase at present of about 10 per cent. a year in the demand for electricity. My figures may not quite agree with other figures, but I went to the trouble of calculating the way the demand has gone over the past decade. The extraordinary thing is that by far the biggest single increase was from 1st April, 1950, to 31st March, 1951, when there was a 22 per cent. increase. From 1951 to 1952, it was 11 per cent.; from 1952 to 1953, 11 per cent.; from 1953 to 1954, it was 13 per cent.; from 1954 to 1955, it was 14 per cent.; from 1955 to 1956, ten per cent.; from 1956 to 1957, it was four per cent.; from 1957 to 1958, it was five per cent.; and from 1958 to 1959, it was eight per cent. It has been nine per cent. on my calculation up to 31st March, 1960.
I think the Minister used the wrong figure of ten per cent., but I am prepared to accept that—I am not quibbling about it. It is extraordinary that if the Board was scraping the bottom of the barrel last year, it can stand an expansion of demand of 10 per cent. a year over the next three and a half years on the basis that there will be only 80 additional megawatts coming into operation—that a 10 per cent. increases in generating capacity will provide for a ten per cent. compound increases in demand. The case put before the Oireachtas does not hold water, and therefore, in the hope that the Minister will be satisfied with getting a reasonable part of what he has asked for, I have put down this amendment.