Questions remain over our climate change plan
SIMON Coveney was interviewed on Morning Ireland on Monday and he again repeated the Government’s Climate Change Action Plan (aspiration?) for having 1million electric vehicles (EVs) on Irish roads by 2030.
I was reminded of my ‘gatecrashing’ the Climate Change Plan ‘Public Town Hall Meeting’ at UCC in Cork on June 22, 2019, which had been planned as the first of a series of such public meetings the Government said it would hold all across Ireland, but which then turned out to be the only one of its kind.
Despite my best efforts at that meeting to ask a question of the ministers present (Simon Coveney and Richard Bruton), Green Party members managed to ‘hog’ the public microphone, and few others got a chance to express their views. Towards the end, I went to Minister Coveney and handed him a document with some questions I would have liked answered. Coveney told me he would read my document. However, I have heard nothing from the minister or his officials since then.
The topic of my question was to point out that the requirement for electricity to power 1million EVs – and indeed, retrofitting the heating systems of 2million homes – would require a big increase in electricity demand from EirGrid.
The present peak demand is around 5,000 megawatts on the island of Ireland’s national grid. Plugging in 1million EVs would increase that demand by around 8,000 megawatts. Two million homes warmed by heat pumps would add at least another 6,000 megawatts to the load demand, if these usage elements were to be switched on-line – all at the same time.
The simple question I keep asking of politicians and media people is: ‘Where is all this electricity supply to come from?’ The present and planned inter-connectors have a 2,000-megawatt limitation.
Even if the cohort of wind turbines was to increase exponentially, to match this possible (projected) electricity demand by 2030, it would not even come close to servicing all of the Irish consumers with electrical power – population numbers which by then will have increased by several tens of thousands more than are living in Ireland today, possibly up to 7million or more on the island by the end of the decade.
Even that extra demand would not be taking into account any increase in the electricity requirements of the many data centres planned, or indeed any possible growth in Ireland’s GDP/economic expansion in the next ten years.
TOM BALDWIN, Midleton, Co. Cork.