A local government Minister believes Lough Ree Power Station should be made ready to come back into service in case of emergency.
Longford/Westmeath TD and Minister of State Peter Burke says that the station could generate enough power to cover a significant amount of the expected national shortfall in energy supplies.
According to the local representative, there is a gap of 280 megawatts between the available power generation nationwide and the expected demand, with the Lanesboro power station able to generate around 100 megawatts.
The facility which was closed in 2020 still has significant supplies of harvested peat stocks.
Minister Burke believes the station could be brought back into operation as much of the infrastructure remains on site.
Speaking to the Joe Finnegan Show today, he says wide spread power outages will cause major damage to the economy and must be avoided:
In the short term, if we are in a position where we can't provide energy into our economy the absolute concern and disaster that would cause far outweighs the fact in terms the present emergency.
Obviously this would only be a short term measure so I think we need to be pragmatic here instead of wrapping ourselves up in ideology.
If we look over to Germany, Austria and the Netherlands, all of those countries are re-opening power plants.
