The State's largest electricity generating station, at Moneypoint, Co Clare, will pursue all avenues to make it more environmentally friendly, its manager has said. A recent Government report includes a recommendation to cease burning coal at the plant.
The National Climate Change Strategy, produced by the Department of the Environment, says "measures supportive of ceasing coal-firing in Moneypoint by 2008" will be put in place.
"First of all, it means we have eight years to solve the problem," said Mr Paul Mulvaney, Moneypoint's newly appointed plant manager. "We are going to consider all the options and we are not going to give a knee-jerk reaction to it."
The 920-megawatt plant, which came into operation in 1986, employs 298 people, pays about £7.5 million in salaries a year and purchases more than £2 million in services locally.
Moneypoint runs on a 24-hour basis, using two million tonnes of coal annually. In contrast, other industries use 100,000 tonnes and households use 300,000 tonnes annually, according to OECD figures for 1996.
The coal at Moneypoint is ground to a fine substance before being burnt. Most of the ash by-product, about 180,000 tonnes, is sold to Irish Cement in Co Limerick. The remaining 20,000 tonnes of heavier material is used in road surfacing.
However, the option to close the plant is unrealistic at present as the plant supplies between a quarter and a third of the national power requirement, when the national grid is operating at full capacity and when demand is growing at about 6 per cent annually. "If Moneypoint closed tomorrow there would be power cuts," Mr Mulvaney said.
The plant already operates to a high environmental standard and has been awarded an ISO 14001 certificate. It has controls for reducing nitrogen-oxide emissions and burns a special low-sulphur coal.
"If it is the considered response to the document that we will continue to use coal, we will be looking to further reduce emissions of nitrogen-oxides and sulphur-oxides," he said.
Although there was a call this week by Clare county councillor Mr Tom Prendeville to extend the national gas network to Moneypoint, Mr Mulvaney said a new, gas-fired plant was not necessarily the best economic option because of its expense. It would also increase the State's dependency on oil and gas and their fluctuating world prices. About 70 per cent of Moneypoint's coal is bought on long-term contract.
The Moneypoint site in west Clare is a strategic one. It has a specially built deep-water port which handles the largest container ships to visit the State. "It is quite likely that it will continue to generate power in some form or another, but it will be based on an economic assessment on all of the options facing the ESB," said Mr Mulvaney.
Mr Gerry Talty, chairman of the plant's shop stewards' group, said new power plants were only keeping pace with the annual growth in electricity demand. Moneypoint would exist as long as capacity was required but staff were open to any changes necessary on environmental grounds.
He added that the 300 miles of high-voltage power lines which run across the State, from Moneypoint to Kildare and Meath, were a major infrastructural asset which would never be built again because of planning permission difficulties.
"They are going to be producing 920 megawatts of electricity in Moneypoint into the next decade. Building pylons is not an option anymore. That pylon system is going to be used."
Last year, the option of switching to gas was also considered by the International Energy Agency, an OECD body, which concluded that it would be "a profitable investment" which "would yield the largest emission reduction".
Clare Fianna Fail TD Mr Brendan Daly raised the issue of the plant's importance on a regional and national basis with the Taoiseach this week.
"The rationale behind Moneypoint from day one was to diversify because of our dependency on oil and because the oil crisis in the 1970s nearly wrecked the economy. That is as relevant today as it was then," he said.