Energy Policy: Motion [Private Members] Dail Éireann — 2026-09-17 ============================================================ Brian Stanley (IND), Laois The debate we are having here is a very important one. It is probably the most important one that is in the Dáil this week for the simple fact that energy, how it is charged for, how it is priced, who has access to it and who generates it will be a key issue as we move forward. By any standard, we are in an extraordinary situation because of the extraordinary number of data centres we have compared with other EU countries - ten times more, on average. We must take into account that a lot of American states are now resisting the location of data centres in them. Ireland is becoming the favoured home for them and now we have 120. I am not saying that data centres are a bad thing per se , but this is a really extraordinary situation, and it is going to become worse. The Government will highlight the jobs, and there are some jobs, but it is a few thousand jobs. It is not the tens of thousands of jobs the Minister is outlining as permanent jobs in these data centres. That is the reality. If you look at the usage of electricity, almost a quarter of our electricity publicly available on the grid is now going to supply data centres. That is due to rise to over 30% in the coming four to five years. Data centres are using the same amount of electricity as over 2 million households in the State. It is putting huge pressure on the grid and the Government knows that. It is creating pressure for demand and putting huge pressure for investment. The grid is simply not able to take what is there. Who is footing the bill for the upgrade? Householders are shouldering the heaviest burden because they are paying the highest for electricity, almost double what the data centres are paying. They are paying a grid improvement levy as well. A recent Friends of the Earth report estimates that households forked out an additional €263 from 2021 to 2023 to pay for the additional costs of the load being put on the grid and usage by data centres. On the costs, we are told by successive Government analyses that creating so-called competition in the electricity market would lower prices. This is what we were told back in the eighties and nineties. We have the competition now, but we have highest prices. We used to have one of the lowest. We had the third or fourth lowest in the European Union. We were almost at the bottom at one stage. Now we are at the top of it. When the ESB was the sole supplier we had the cheapest rate in the EU. The competition worked the opposite way because there is a profit margin. Who has the profit margin? The owners of the large electricity companies have it. I do not have a problem with the ESB because we owned it. However, the facts are the other ones in the so-called market are creaming it off. On average we are paying 38% higher prices than other EU states and the average across Europe. The Government needs to introduce a consumption levy, and it certainly needs to be considered on data centres. They are getting cut-price electricity. They are making large profits. It can be done. We need to start thinking about low- and middle-income households. Government is fond of talking about people who get up every morning, middle Ireland and everything else. I think middle Ireland are households on less than €75,000 gross. We need to improve the solar panel grants for homes so people can afford them, and grade the cost as income goes down in a household so those with lower incomes get the best benefit or get it free altogether. Certainly, we need to target workers in what Government likes to talk about as the middle-income bracket. We need to introduce plug-in solar. That can be done. For low-income households in particular, solar is a quick and easy win to reduce the amount of electricity being used. That is a key issue here. Along with reducing the price rate we need to reduce the amount being used. We need to accelerate and increase the number of homes being retrofitted. I will make one point to the Minister of State. I was contacted by the principal of a national school yesterday morning. The school got solar panels in the past two years. It is concerned now by reports that it will not get paid for the electricity it is feeding back into the grid. It is not going to get the credits on that. The Minister of State might take that away for the Government to deal with because a lot of people added solar panels on the basis that it was going to reduce the cost of the amount they were using themselves, and to sustainably generate a bit of electricity. They are selling that to companies, and now the private companies are going to get that for free. The point he is making is that the Government subsidised it and householders paid for it as well. Government and householders paid for it. Is it now going to be fed back into grid for the private companies to receive free of charge and make super profits on it? It is perverse what is going to happen. Government needs to take that into account, particularly the schools situation and that of householders. I ask the Minister of State to take that back to his Government colleagues to get it dealt with because we should not allow that to happen. People put them up in good faith and we should not break that faith with people. --- Source: Houses of the Oireachtas. Licensed under CC BY 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/). The Official Report is revised after first publication; the fetch timestamp below identifies the version quoted. Record URI: https://data.oireachtas.ie/akn/ie/debateRecord/dail/2026-09-17/debate/main Retrieved: 2026-09-28T05:50:48+00:00 Sitting date: 2026-09-17