Homes and businesses face a €1.4 billion bill to cover the cost of emergency power plants to bolster stretched electricity supplies after regulators declared they will be needed for the next two winters.
National electricity grid operator EirGrid had four temporary fossil-fuel power plants built in Dublin, Offaly and Kerry in 2023 in a scheme to allow it provide last-resort emergency electricity supplies.
Delays in building new-generation capacity and power lines prompted the energy industry overseer, the Commission for the Regulation of Utilities (CRU), to order recently that the emergency plants remain in place up to February 2029 at a cost of €229 million.
Extending the emergency electricity supply scheme into the next two winters will drive its total cost to €1.44 billion, details published by the commission confirm. Figures from last year showed that its cost had, by then, topped €1 billion.
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Homes and businesses ultimately shoulder the cost of maintaining the emergency power plants through network charges on their electricity bills.
Those customers have already paid for their installation, the most expensive element of the scheme, and continue to pay to keep them available.
A CRU note estimates that households could pay between 79 cent and €14.96 a year towards maintaining the backup generators on the system over the next two winters.
How that cost is spread over the years up to 2030 will determine the annual share of the bill paid by residential customers, one industry source familiar with the scheme explained on Wednesday.
EirGrid initially installed the backup plants for three-year terms with optional extensions.
The extensions run to February 2029 in the case of one plant at Huntstown, Co Dublin, and December 2028 for another on North Wall in the capital’s docks. Generators at Shannonbridge, Co Offaly, and Tarbert, Co Kerry, will remain until March 31st, 2028.
[ Surge in demand for power forces EirGrid to switch on emergency power plant twiceOpens in new window ]
Minister for Climate, Environment and Energy Darragh O’Brien had to approve the extensions given to the facilities before the CRU published its order.
The commission cited delays in building new power stations and in the construction of the Celtic interconnector linking Ireland with France among the reasons for keeping the emergency facilities on the system.
EirGrid has called on the last resort plants only twice since they were built, both occasions this year.
Most recently the grid operator deployed the Tarbert plant for more than an hour after August’s eclipse shut down solar power plants that were then supplying much of the State’s electricity.
EirGrid subsequently confirmed that it used the North Wall facility in June to “manage generation adequacy”.
The grid company always stresses that the emergency power plants are a last resort. EirGrid commissioned them under a plan agreed with the CRU in 2021 to offset the threat of shortages in the Republic’s electricity supplies.
