The Minister for the Environment, Climate and Communications has said the Government "will be able to keep the lights on" over the coming months.
"We expect to be able to provide the power that this country needs in the next two to three months," Eamon Ryan said on RTÉ's News at One.
Responding to reports of plans of fuel rationing and concerns over civil order, he said "no one should ignore the fact we're facing into a very challenging situation".
However, Mr Ryan said the Government has contingency planning for emergencies but it does not expect or envisage the "very dramatic scenarios" described in some media reports.
The Green Party leader said the "biggest challenge" in the coming winter for householders and businesses will be prices.
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Asked what the Government will do for such people, he said it would have to be set out in the Budget but windfall charges for energy companies would have to be considered alongside supports for householders.
He said he did not believe the British system of price caps on energy prices worked, as they were ending at the most difficult time and that "doesn't necessarily protect your consumers".
He said time-of-day pricing and a campaign of reducing and reusing were the right policy measures to address the problem.
Mr Ryan claimed the main reason for the crisis in prices was the war in Ukraine, "where energy has been used as a weapon of war".
He said this had a knock-on consequence on the price of electricity as half of Ireland's electricity comes from gas.
"So it is a huge concern and is the real challenge that the Government will be able to face up to and help this country through," Mr Ryan said.
"We will be able to keep the lights on," he added.
He said the Government's energy security policy was focused on achieving the balance between three objectives: Secure power, affordable power, and clean power.
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Social Democrats climate spokesperson Jennifer Whitmore dismissed Minister Ryan's response as a "wing and a prayer", saying that he "has his head in the sand".
Despite repeated warnings from regulators, she said that "senior ministers have been shooting the messenger", and "have been asleep at the wheel".
The Sinn Féin spokesperson on climate action has welcomed the Oireachtas Climate Committee’s decision to meet next Tuesday.
Darren O'Rourke said the Commission for Regulation of Utilities (CRU), EirGrid and Minister Ryan are all invited to attend.
Yesterday, Deputy O'Rourke had called for their attendance at a meeting as soon as possible.
Shortages pre-date war, says expert
Earlier this week, the former head of ESB International said potential shortage of energy supply has "nothing to do with the war in Ukraine".
Don Moore said that while the war was "unpredictable", the issue has come to the fore because a shortage in supply has been ignored.
Mr Moore said that Eirgrid had originally identified an anticipated gap between supply and demand in 2017, when the Commission for Regulation of Utilities was "tasked with encouraging developers to build new generation in the Irish system."
Asked about warnings pre-dating the war such as Eirgrid's All-Island Generation Capacity Statement which found Ireland required additional generation capacity of 260 MW by October 2022, Mr Ryan said there were other issues and challenges that had to be faced but nothing "like as significant" as the price impacts of Ukraine.
"We didn't deliver back in 2019 some of the additional power capacity that we knew we needed. That was largely gas-fired power generation, which acts as backup to wind," he said.
"For a variety of largely technical and market-related issues, that power supply wasn't provided," he added.
He said there was also a significant increase in electricity demand going back to 2018, half of which was from additional data centres coming into the system.
"That also is something that this Government has started to address, We've changed the rules, changed the whole policy approach to make sure that any new data centres have to fit in within our security and our low-carbon energy future," Mr Ryan said.
This month, Dublin City Council approved planning permission to Amazon to build two new data centres in north Dublin.
He said the economy needed these companies and that the Government was working with them to make sure data centres are located in a place that supports the grid.
Mr Ryan said they must have flexible demand management for when there is "tightness" in the electricity market and that their backup generation is zero carbon.
Asked about plans for additional backup generation of 200 megawatts for the coming winter, Mr Ryan said it was subject to legal challenge and delayed but would be available next year.
"In April 2021, we recognised that the auction system back in 2019 hadn't delivered, that needed to do emergency procurement and purchasing systems," he said.
Mr Ryan said the Government would be purchasing an additional 450 megawatts on the market in spring next year.
In the absence of the 200 megawatts this year, he said the Government has "to be very careful".
"There's a third issue which is part of the problem we've had, is that some of the older fossil fuel plants weren't available, or indeed some of the modern fossil fuel plants," he added.
He said this partly due to maintenance programmes being disrupted due to Covid-19.
"We have that at least 650 megawatts of additional emergency generation, which will be delivered in the coming 18 months," he said.
For this winter, Mr Ryan also said there is also significant" generation capacity coming from renewables as the Government had contracted more from that sector than in the previous 10 years combined.
He said there were "several hundred megawatts starting to come on stream".
Mr Ryan said a switch to renewables was the real solution to being dependent on imported fuel prices.
In terms of backup supply, he accepted that Ireland will need approximately two additional gigawatts from flexible gas "which will use less gas but be there to complement cheaper wind resources".
"The emergency process will provided about 650 of that, the remaining is being provided through auction schemes that will deliver," he said
"It will take two-to-three years, that's the reality but it's those years that we have a supply tightness and we can get through it," he added.
Asked about gas storage capacity and Tánaiste Leo Varadkar's support for a Shannon LNG terminal, Mr Ryan said he did not believe this was the option as there would also be a "massive" increase in demand alongside it and this would not improve energy security.
He said Ireland needed to look at storage in a variety of ways including battery storage and the construction of two new interconnectors.
He said a report on storage options would be published "shortly".
