13 hours ago
Gas Networks Ireland spent €190m building 'capacity, security, and resilience' last year
Gas Networks Ireland (GNI) spent almost €190m last year on building capacity, security, and resilience in the system, including on critical pipelines and physical and cyber security.
GNI chairman Kevin Toland said this was to meet the growing energy demand in Ireland, and secure the network from 'ever growing malevolent threats'.
GNI's annual report for 2024 said it will spend more than €200m in 2025 to further bolster the security of the network.
Mr Toland pointed out that gas plays a 'critical role' in Ireland's energy system.
It is involved in the production of over 40% of Ireland's electricity — rising as high as 83% when renewable energy is not available.
Writing in the GNI annual report, Mr Toland said they submitted a proposal in April 2024 to the Government to create a strategic gas emergency reserve to protect Ireland in the event of a gas supply reduction.
Almost a year later the Government said it was backing the plan and would set up a liquified natural gas (LNG) terminal for such a purpose.
In the report, Mr Toland said GNI invested €188m in the safety, capacity, security, and resilience of the network in 2024, including at stations in Moffat, Scotland, where both the British gas pipelines to Ireland come from.
We also continued to advance our cyber and physical security programmes to protect our network from ever growing malevolent threats.
The report said managing the risk of a physical or cyber attack was going to be a major priority moving forward.
'In 2025 we will invest in excess of €200m of capital investment to improve the safety, capacity, security and resilience of the network.'
The report also said the €200m will progress the development of the strategic gas emergency reserve, key transmission connections, and facilitate a significant capacity upgrade project at their stations in Scotland.
'The threat of a successful cyber attack remains a key risk, and we remain vigilant to this very real and growing threat,' the report said.
'The UK remains Ireland's principal supply source.
'Any disruption to the UK's energy supply, or failure/disruption to our strategic gas infrastructure could seriously impact Gas Networks Ireland's business/operations.'
It said GNI, along with the Irish Naval Service, 'responded to a subsea security incident when a foreign vessel [Russian ship, the Yantar] was detected operating on top of the sub sea pipeline Interconnector 1 in the Irish sea.
'As a result an unplanned sub sea survey to ensure no interference to the pipeline was completed.'
It said GNI was a founding partner in 2004 of the European Union's horizon project VIGIMARE, through which key capital projects received €4.75m in grant funding to further develop 'our subsea critical asset protection' from the EU horizon europe research and innovation programme.
'This innovation project uses artificial intelligence algorithms on multiple data sources to identify and alarm if a vessel is acting suspiciously in the vicinity of subsea infrastructure,' it said.
