What can be done about energy costs and blackout risks?

If all the talk of our gas and electricity supply running short and the sky-rocketing price of fossil fuels leaving us short could be converted into a power source Ireland would have enough energy to keep the lights on, for a generation.

The grim reality that many Irish households will be asked to pay over €2,000 more for heating and lighting in 2022 than they did in 2021 has been impossible to avoid in recent months.

But as if that wasn’t bad enough – and it most certainly is - on top of soaring prices, there is also the growing threat of blackouts hitting domestic electricity supply just when we need them least – in winter.

How can Ireland find a way out of the energy crisis?

Listen | 25:19

The spike in the cost of living, fuelled by soaring energy prices is occupying the minds of Ministers with less than three weeks to go until Budget 2023 and they are acutely aware that they will bear the brunt of the public’s anger if it cannot keep the lights on through the winter months.

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But what exactly is going on? Is the war in Ukraine and Russia’s weaponising of the flow of gas from east to west behind the blackout threat as well as the spike in energy prices?

Or are the reasons more nuanced and could the Government and the regulators here have done more and sooner to secure our energy supply and protect Irish consumers from supply problems?

And what can the Government do to offset the worst of the energy crisis in the days and weeks ahead and will measures contained in the Budget be enough to keep the country on an even financial keel through what is promising to be the most unsettling winter in a generation or more?

In the news talks to ESRI analyst and energy expert Dr Murieann Lynch and to our political reporter Jack Horgan Jones about what lies ahead.