The dire warnings will increase pressure on the Government to support households with a massive budgetary intervention of one-off measures running to what Tánaiste Leo Varadkar described on Friday as “several billion”.
Energia has told the Government the sector is facing huge new costs arising from the need to provide “massive advance collateral payments” to purchase gas. The increasing burden of cost, the company warned, “has the potential to cause the entire Irish energy market to malfunction, giving rise to significant adverse economic and social effects, unless appropriate measures are implemented urgently and in a collaborative and co-ordinated manner”.
“We encourage the Government to engage urgently with energy companies to address the potential issue,” it wrote.