Dáil Éireann Debate, Thursday - 15 June 2023
84. Deputy Darren O'Rourke asked the Minister for the Environment, Climate and Communications what additional measures are being taken by the Government to ensure our grid has the capacity to accommodate the required increase in connections; and if he will make a statement on the matter. [28915/23]
View answerWhat additional measures are being taken by the Government to ensure our grid has the capacity to accommodate the required increase in connections to manage the energy transition? Will the Minister make a statement on the matter?
Work is under way on a number of initiatives in this vein as outlined in Climate Action Plan 2023, CAP23. That plan includes a commitment to carry out a public consultation on private wires, and a deadline for publication of quarter 4 of 2023 has been set. The policy area of private wires is broad in nature and, as such, detailed consideration must go into formulating the consultation to ensure all aspects of the policy area are considered. Publishing a consultation and, ultimately, providing a clear policy position on the issue of private wires is a priority for me. Work on this policy area is ongoing in my Department, with my officials engaging directly in recent months with interested stakeholders as part of the consultation formulation process.
Also under CAP23, my Department has committed to developing an electricity storage policy framework by quarter 3 of this year. A consultation was held early in the year, which closed on 27 January, and the responses are currently being analysed. My Department is now in the process of preparing the final framework and is engaging closely with key stakeholders, including Departments, State agencies and industry experts regarding the issues raised during the consultation process.
A hydrogen strategy for Ireland is also being developed, with an anticipated completion deadline of the second quarter of 2023. This strategy will set out the need for a robust safety and regulatory framework to be in place as well as the need to ensure licensing and permitting procedures are in place to enable sustainable indigenously produced green hydrogen supply chains to develop.
The Minister has spoken about private wires, the storage policy framework and the hydrogen strategy. The private wires consultation has been a long time coming. It could not happen quickly enough. In his first supplementary response, will the Minister address the capacity and resourcing of EirGrid as a vehicle to deliver on this ambition in the first instance? I regularly meet stakeholders. The Minister, like me and many others, will attend conferences on the opportunity presented by renewables, offshore wind and onshore wind. A number of other Deputies touched on some other themes, including ports and the planning system. The grid comes up time and again, including the capacity in the system, especially of EirGrid, to deliver on the ambition. We have Shaping our Electricity Future and we expect Shaping our Electricity Future 1.1 soon, it is hoped. There is a hope and expectation that the ambition will be even greater there. Will EirGrid be fit to deliver on it?
I met EirGrid, the ESB and the Commission for Regulation of Utilities recently. Therefore, this issue is at the top of our agenda and minds at the moment. The Deputy is right that the grid is key in this transformation. Having a flexible grid of a sufficient scale is vital. I will pick out three examples of what we are learning from that. First, I have huge confidence in EirGrid. We have given it the task of developing the offshore grid. It will need to be resourced and given the financial capability to deploy that. Many policies will go to Government and come out in the next month. One will be our interconnection policy. We are building two interconnectors at the moment. We will build more to the UK, France and beyond. That is significant and requires significant investment.
We also have to focus on ESB Networks, particularly because it is not just about the big interconnection and transmission grid. We have to look right at the street and how we put in new storage facilities at the local transformer station. Critically, we have to work with the Data Protection Commissioner so that we have good sharing of data and have real public confidence in the use of that non-identifying data about collective use on the street so that we can start switching on and off devices and give ourselves real capability at the distribution grid level.
EirGrid's strategy for capacity and workforce planning was last published in line with the Climate Action Plan 2019, which the former Minister, Deputy Bruton, published. It is somewhat out of date and EirGrid is to come with a new strategy in the not-too-distant future. Like Shaping our Electricity Future 1.1, I hope it will have increased ambition and that it will have a plan to resource and deliver on that increased ambition. Does the Minister have a comment on that? Private wires is an issue for flexibility.
The consultation is welcome, but when does the Minister expect it to be concluded? When will we have a new regulatory and policy environment in place?
I expect it to be concluded before the end of this year. I will have to come back to the Deputy on exactly how long it will take to put in the regulatory systems.
I will finish on the third point I was going to raise, which addresses the Deputy's question, in a sense. It comes out of recent conversations with EirGrid on its shaping of our electricity 2.0, as it were. Very good work has been done by EirGrid on that. One of the ways the electricity system is evolving, and we saw this during the offshore auctions, is around the risk of constraint or curtailment. When we have so much renewable power, what do we do when there is surplus power? I now believe the management of that risk, cost or price should not lie with the developer but with the State, EirGrid, the ESB and how we use that power. By the end of this decade, with the developing solar, offshore wind and onshore wind projects we know we will deliver, we will have a significant surplus of electricity. We need to design the system so we can convert that into new business, industrial or other decarbonising opportunities. We are one of the countries ahead of the game in that. We have probably the highest level of renewable variable power on an integrated synchronistic system. One of the key issues we have is thinking about how we use our surplus power. We know those projects will be there by the end of the decade and designing the end use to benefit from that will be part of the shaping of the electricity future we need to design.
