This publication is categorised as a CSO Frontier Series Output. Particular care must be taken when interpreting the statistics in this release as it may use new methods which are under development and/or data sources which may be incomplete, for example, new administrative data sources.
In this report we present an analysis of the Energy Value Chain (EVC) in Ireland. It follows the same basic approach as previous such publications on the Information & Communications Technology (ICT) and Food & Agriculture sectors as part of the CSO’s Frontier Series.
The Energy Value Chain activity is characterised by a range of goods and services (goods such as fossil fuels and services such as retail in petrol stations), and differs from ICT (dominated by services and intangibles) and Food & Agriculture (physical products).
Throughout the publication the System of National Accounts is used as the integrating framework to ensure a coherent and consistent analysis emerges from this work. In fact, this Frontier Series leverages a combination of new and existing methodologies and uses data from the Supply and Use Tables and the Institutional Sector Accounts, along with a variety of other sources, to produce more detailed estimates of production, consumption, trade and investment across the Irish economy.
The EVC is broken down into a number of subsectors by economic activity for this report, as shown in Table 2.1. Economic activity is divided according to the European NACE system. In this classification, distribution of electricity and gas is grouped with electricity generation, while distribution of solid and liquid fuel is classed with the wholesale and retail distribution of other goods.
There is a distinction between energy products and industries producing energy. For example, a producer of refined oil as an energy source may also produce oil as an engine lubricant.
From the perspective of producers in economic activity sectors, we present the EVC in a sequence of accounts, a structure used in National Accounts, to present the flow of transactions in the economy. We quantify in turn the total output for these sectors, less their intermediate consumption i.e. the goods and services that are used up in production by these enterprises. The difference represents the gross value added (GVA) to the economy in 2020.
The Energy Value Chain analysis covers a number of other aspects, summarised below.
Labour - the variety of occupations, education attainment and regional distribution.
Capital - the nature and scale of investment in construction and equipment assets.
Producers - a study of domestic production, imports, trade margins, taxes and subsidies, with a focus on the energy sources used in electricity generation.
Consumers - a profile of energy goods and services consumption by businesses and households.
Wholesale, Retail & Taxes - sale of energy goods to end-users and details of the taxes levied.
Productivity - an examination by ownership and size class of labour productivity.
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