Irish Times view on threat to electricity supplies

Serious concerns about the adequacy of electricity supplies will be raised in a report due soon from EirGrid, the national grid operator. It may be tempting to take steady power provision for granted. But constraints that are already bearing down on the system will worsen for years to come. There are questions not only for Tánaiste Leo Varadkar, who is Minister for Enterprise, Green leader Eamon Ryan, who has responsibility for energy, but also the Coalition at large.

Several forces are at work. First, demand for electricity is surging and is set to grow further while the State strives to meet ambitious climate targets set down in law. This goes beyond the advance of business data-centres, whose growth in four years spurred demand by the equivalent of some 560,000 new households. The move to electric cars requires increased generation, so too economic growth. The same is true of turning away from fossil fuels in home-heating.

Second, supply constraints are growing. Just as fewer homes will have oil boilers in the future, older fossil fuel electricity generation is being wound down to cut harmful carbon emissions. Increasing use of renewable wind power is supposed to fill the gap left by oil, peat and coal. But that on its own is not enough. Backup generation is needed when the wind isn’t blowing.

In many ways the looming crunch centres on the lack of visibility over the development of new gas-fired power stations to be switched on when the wind is down. Given the priority on renewable energy, such plant is deployed only in reserve. That undermines the investment case, as standby power stations are just as expensive and time-consuming to build and maintain as plant that supplies the grid all the time. One idea is to promote investment with a premium price for reserve power, but that raises the prospect of potential plant backers delaying to extract a higher price than electricity users will ultimately pay.

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It would be wrong to view these constraints as theoretical, medium-term risks. They are much more immediate. For one thing, the Commission for Regulation of Utilities has warned of “rolling blackouts” if new data centres are not curtailed. Varadkar has said the answer to that conundrum lies in wind power and interconnection with France but that is simply not sufficient.

There is more. After system alerts last winter due to supply constraints, two key stations are currently off-line for repairs. Moves were set in train to install emergency generation next winter but such efforts stopped after a legal challenge. The expectation now is that the two stations can return to meet peak demand. Still, steps may yet be taken to curb demand by offering large industrial users a financial reward to switch off the network.

These clear signals of distress call for decisive Government action to remove any doubt over the stability of supply.