Government to spend €350m on ‘jet engines’ to supply emergency electricity in the event of power outages

They will account for €350 million worth of emergency generation capacity the Government is ordering, to get the country through the difficult winters ahead.

The mobile turbines are the kind deployed to countries in the wake of natural disasters and wars where power plants are destroyed.

Around 24 of them will be bought and installed in clusters in two separate locations, yet to be announced.

“These are effectively jet engines,” Environment Minister Eamon Ryan said. “You put a transformer on them and a fuel supply attached to them.”

He described their purchase as a “last resort”.

Contracts with suppliers are expected to be completed in the next week or two but it will take around nine months for the turbines to be delivered, so they will not be in place to help bolster supplies this winter.

Mr Ryan said they would provide backup power for the winters of 2023-’24, 2024-’25 and probably into 2025-’26.

After that, it is expected new long-term power generation facilities will be built and ready for usage. Mr Ryan said he hoped some of the €350m might be recouped from the onward sale of the turbines, although he favoured their retention in case they are needed again.

Mr Ryan also gave details of how the €600 worth of electricity credits would be applied to householders’ bills over the winter months

It is required that they are convertible to run on carbon-free hydrogen, which may become available at some point in the future.

For deployment over the next few winters, however, they are expected to use ‘distillate’ or liquid petroleum gas rather than regular gas.

In total, they will be capable of supplying 450 megawatts (MW) of electricity.

Peak-time electricity use in Ireland is about 5,000MW. It takes all the various existing power plants, wind farms and solar installations combined to meet that demand, with very little headroom if demand surges higher or one of them breaks down.

The type of turbines being bought are favoured for emergency generation because they are designed with aircraft in mind, so they are compact and very fast to power up in response to urgent situations.

Eirgrid, which manages the national electricity transmission system, has warned that electricity supplies will be under greater strain than previously thought this winter. It says the outlook for the next few years is “serious”.

“It is likely that in the coming years we will experience system alerts and will need to work proactively to mitigate the risk of more serious impacts,” it said.

Mr Ryan also gave details of how the €600 worth of electricity credits would be applied to householders’ bills over the winter months.

He said they would appear in three instalments of €183.49 between November and April, as VAT had to be deducted.

Some households in the Traveller community missed out on the €200 credit applied earlier this year because they did not have separate meters on halting sites.

Mr Ryan said this would not happen again, but he was unable to say if the missed credit would be retrospectively applied.