82. Deputy Pa Daly asked the Minister for Climate, Energy and the Environment the measures he is taking to address the fact that 300,000 households are in arrears on their energy bills; and if he will make a statement on the matter. [49202/25]
Sentiment score: 0.17
Household bills are 70% above what they were in 2022 and the value of arrears has jumped by almost 50%, even with the electricity credits each winter. There are 300,000 people in arrears. The Government has said it does not want electricity credits to be the new normal but the rise in prices and the number of people in arrears are an emergency and not normal either. This demands an emergency response.
Sentiment score: -0.09
It is more than unfortunate the Minister is not here in the middle of a cost-of-living crisis to address the concerns of people who are really struggling in an emergency. Over the summer households have been hit with a spate of emergency hikes from Energia, Flogas, Pinergy and SSE Airtricity. They have been told they can expect another at least another €200 to be whacked onto their annual energy bills. In the first week back in the Dáil the Minister does not show to tell us what he is going to do about it. All we know is the supports that have been there over the last number of years are going to be ripped away despite Irish energy costs being the highest in Europe, at €500 above average and 70% above 2022 levels. When I asked the Minister via parliamentary question what impact he thought the withdrawal of energy credits would have, I was told it was not a matter for the Minister but for the CRU. I find it very hard to believe the impact of policy choices is not the responsibility of the Government, as outlined in the letter from the Leas-Cheann Comhairle, and that it has no duty to consider and analyse its efforts. The CRU might be surprised to hear about this.
Sentiment score: -0.08
The Government could not have had a more targeted measure than the energy credits that we have had for the last number of years and people are facing the same if not higher energy prices now. The Government continues to blame everyone apart from itself for it. The costs are due to political choices about whose energy needs get prioritised, who pays and who is protected. However, the Government has chosen to prioritise the energy needs of data centres and the profits of energy companies rather than ordinary people who are trying to keep the lights on and stay warm. If we want to bring down energy prices in the long term, the market needs a radical overhaul. We need major reform of the status quo with new measures to hold the energy companies to account rather than the blatant profiteering that has been taking place. We also need a fair funding model for our grid and the renewable transition rather than the Government's regressive approach which makes households shoulder a disproportionate burden of the cost of the network charges and the PSO levy rather than placing the burden on the data centres, which are, relatively speaking, let off the hook. It is possible to change this and I ask the Government to reconsider and redress the unjust burden placed on small businesses and households.
Sentiment score: 0.10
84. Deputy Pa Daly asked the Minister for Climate, Energy and the Environment the measures he is taking to address the concerns raised by senior Government officials regarding the impact of data centres on household bills and housing development; and if he will make a statement on the matter. [49203/25]
Sentiment score: 0.10
Officials warned that the Government’s approach to data centres is posing a threat to housing targets and driving up our energy costs. Does the Government plan to continue to bury its head in the sand or is it going to tackle this head on? I am not sure which Minister of State is going to take this question, but if it is the Minister of State, Deputy Dooley, I was listening to him on Radio Kerry last week when he was talking about marine planning. He criticised the Government, saying it needed to move away from navel-gazing and that it had sat on its laurels. Is the Government sitting on its laurels on this issue also, or is it actually going to do something about it?
Sentiment score: -0.21
The large energy users the Minister of State is talking about are relatively getting off the hook and they are pushing up household bills. In a confidential memo recently released to us under a freedom of information, FOI, request, the Secretary General of the Department of public expenditure warned that soaring electricity demand, largely attributable to data centres, is forcing the State to spend heavily on new power generation and grid upgrades. As the grid is paid for through network charges, this is inevitably leading to surging household bills. A single data centre can use as much as electricity as the whole city of Kilkenny. The memo also pointed out that data centres were a risk to energy security, to the extent that there is need to “direct Government intervention in the electricity market to purchase generation capacity on an emergency, non-market basis”. All of this is going to have to be paid by the taxpayer through electricity bills, leading to a disproportionate and unfair burden on households. Not only is this unstainable, it is also regressive. Price review 6, as the Minister of State mentioned, represents the perfect opportunity to right this wrong, but the draft decision, unfortunately, seems to extend it further. Will the Minister of State commit to doing something about it to alleviate the burden?
Sentiment score: -0.07
Why then is the Secretary General of the Department saying what is being said and that housing is being threatened by the larger users of electricity? The current proposal in price review 6 is to increase network charges for households. Presumably, the Minister of State does not disagree with that. At the same time, the proposal is to decrease charges relatively for data centres. This is unjustifiable. The excuse used by a lot of the energy providers, such as Energia, is that their network charges are rising. Small businesses are complaining that it is the same. Data centres are the ones driving up energy demand and gobbling up all the new capacity on the grid, but they have consistently not been paying their fair share. I agree with the Minister of State that there is a need for data centres but let them pay their fair share. Their bills have been subsidised for years by small and medium enterprises and households as part of the large energy user subvention. We in Sinn Féin believe that the determination of price review 6 in December must reflect these facts and right these historical wrongs.
Sentiment score: 0.14