The country's biggest electricity provider, ESB, made a record profit of €847 million last year after imposing huge price hikes on households and businesses.
It said the increase was mainly due to the impact of higher wholesale prices in its generation and trading businesses both in Ireland and the UK.
ESB explained that the generation and supply sides of its business are obliged to operate independent of one another so increased profits from its generation division cannot be used to subsidise its Electric Ireland operations.
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ESB Group chief executive Paddy Hayes told RTE that he was aware of the sensitivity required to discuss profits during the ongoing cost-of-living crisis, in which customers continue to struggle to pay bills.
Mr Hayes explained: "All of the increase in profits have come from our generation businesses working in the wholesale markets in Britain and Ireland, and none of those profits have come from our residential customer book, in fact we made a decision to forego profits in our residential customer book."
"I think it is important to emphasise that because we operate under licence we are not in a position to use increased profits in generation to reduce the electricity prices for our residential retail customers," the CEO added.
"But what we have done with the profits is, we have agreed with the Government to pay an enhanced dividend of €327 million this year, which is €200 million more than last year."
At times last year the daily price of generating electricity in Ireland was over 12 times higher than normal.
Electricity prices surged with European natural gas prices to never before seen levels in response to the war in Ukraine and Russia’s reduced gas flows to Europe, RTE reports.
During the year, ESB Group also invested €1.4 billion in energy infrastructure, and almost €300 million in renewable joint-venture projects.
The Irish Mirror previously reported that Minister for Public Expenditure Paschal Donohoe has said that "customers' energy bills must go down as quickly as they went up."
Speaking to RTÉ’s Today with Claire Byrne, Minister Donohoe said that the Government is giving consideration to what it can do if energy companies are returning high levels of profit.
He said: "We do understand it is going to take some time for change in energy prices on global markets to feed through to lower prices for consumers here at home.
"But bills did go up for many over a few months. They shouldn't take a few years to come down again."
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