Ireland’s energy regulator has urged the government to invest in liquefied natural gas infrastructure, arguing that the country has “insufficient safeguards” regarding energy security.
The comments were made early this week by Aoife MacEvilly, chairwoman of the Commission for the Regulation of Utilities (CRU).
“LNG should be considered in the context of energy security,” said MacEvilly.
“There are insufficient safeguards at present.”
She went on to point out that, on Tuesday this week, Ireland had over 5,000 megawatts of renewable energy capacity, including wind.
However, because it was a calm day with little wind, “This morning we were getting as little as 19 megawatts from that capacity.”
MacEvilly stated that the vast majority of energy Ireland was using was from gas and coal via UK interconnectors.
“Every investment should be future-proofed in line with our decarbonisation aspirations,” she said.
Additionally, she mentioned that because of Ireland’s reduced gas from the native Corrib field, Ireland could not rely on gas interconnection from Scotland, urging commercial development of LNG infrastructure.
“We will not decarbonise without this infrastructure,” she said.
According to Eirgrid, today only 22.3% of Ireland’s energy was powered by renewables, with the remaining 77.7% coming from gas (43.9%), coal (19.7%) and “other” (13.9%).