Dr. Jan Geiss:

I fully agree with what the Deputy said. In the past, I was a scientist and I always said that in renewables there is the natural potential - what we can harvest - the technical potential, the economic potential and the social potential and we should not forget this fourth dimension. I am from Germany and we had the same discussion. We called it the asparagus on the landscape - Verspargelung. If one goes for too much wind or for wind only, one will find these limits in social acceptance and this decentralised renewables revolution and energy transition cannot take place over the heads of the citizens. There are several ways. If it is done only with wind in the future, it will mean too much concentration on one solution. We promote the mix of renewables. There should be much more different technologies involved. Ocean technology is not in the market now but there is huge potential in ten or 20 years. The forces of nature are strong and it is difficult to harvest them but there will be solutions for sure. I do not know if photovoltaic power, PV, can also be a solution in Ireland. We are not Italy or Spain in Germany but we still have huge volumes of PV and it is getting cheaper. It works like flat screens. Twenty years ago, a flat screen cost €100,000 but now we can buy it in a supermarket almost for free. The technology market is getting cheaper. They are all in different stages of ripeness but in the next decade other renewables will come in and the mix will be much broader and more adapted to landscape protection and so on.

The second issue is whether the benefits are close enough to the citizen. There are examples in Germany where at the beginning wind park managers were ignorant and arrogant and did not respects the needs of a village, for example, until they understood that people from the village should also make a little money and be part of it. They were given shares or ownership and suddenly they did not see wind farms as a threat and looked on them as windmills with money coming straight into their pockets. Suddenly they loved them. It is an abstract concept for politicians to explain but in the end it will be shocking if we see money flowing out of Europe to buy oil, gas, nuclear resources and so on. We will send our billions of euro to Mr. Putin and some Arab families and they will buy our football clubs. Why can we not keep that money here and leave it with the citizens instead of burning it in the oven? It is complex because people want something in their pockets today and they want to protect their landscape and we have to respect that. Perhaps we need to explain to them what will happen if we do not go now for these solutions temporarily.

It takes one day to take down and disassemble a windmill onshore. That is no problem. However, climate change will run over the landscape and definitely destroy it within a few decades. I do not want to paint too negative an image but these would be the consequences. This may be an opinion on an abstract future but we should also respect what is close to the people and integrate them into the process. The energy transition must not go over the heads of people and we must respect what they need. There are different ways to give people something directly.