Electric Vehicles
Dail Éireann — 2026-04-30
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Réada Cronin (SF), Kildare North

That is great that the Minister has engaged with this and that he will be meeting Professor Caulfield because the need to decarbonise and move to green energy has never been clearly, especially with the illegal wars in Iran, Ukraine, Lebanon and everywhere. The Minister can tell Michéal Martin that we do know about it. People in rural communities depend on their cars and are feeling this the most. One obvious way to protect them from these price shocks is to make electrical vehicles more accessible. The paper to which I refer suggests that this is not really that straightforward. While the good news is that the uptake of EVs in rural areas has been good, many of the people who are reliant on them are charging them at home. This can cause huge spikes in demand that our grid simply cannot handle. Even if people do want to switch to EVs, the grid infrastructure is just not there and that leaves rural communities stuck for the foreseeable future. What has been done to make sure rural areas have the grid capacity that they need so we can get on with the decarbonisation?

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Record URI: https://data.oireachtas.ie/akn/ie/debateRecord/dail/2026-04-30/debate/main
Retrieved: 2026-08-27T06:54:49+00:00
Sitting date: 2026-04-30