Mr. Joseph Curtin:

It is important to be very clear about where we are with costs. I recognise Deputy Dooley's questions and other questions about where we are on our renewable targets. If we take the current trend, we are not going to get anywhere close to meeting our renewables target. That is the answer to the Deputy's question. If we presume a linear extrapolation, we will miss our target by about 3% or maybe slightly more. If we make a really optimistic assumption and imagine an exponential trend where the line curves upwards, we only miss our target by 1% or 2%. We are not on target to meet our renewables target. The main reason for that is the heat sector rather than the electricity sector. That is an important point to make.

The key here is how we will build community acceptance and buy-in. How are going to make sure that our climate policy is socially proofed and community proofed? What has worked in other countries is to quite simply get communities involved in owning these assets. Some 50% of renewables in Germany are owned by local communities in Germany and it is approximately the same in Denmark. Other places like the UK and Ontario are rolling out a whole range of incentives to get communities involved as investors in these technologies. That is the answer. The renewable heat incentive is currently on the table and, notwithstanding the fact that we had an energy White Paper that put energy citizens at the very core, it does not mention communities. It is focused on industrial applications. I think that no matter what policy proposals we are putting forward, be it a replacement to the feed-in tariff for electricity which is probably not going to be a feed-in tariff but some kind of support mechanism, it has to be focused on getting communities and citizens more involved in low-carbon transition. That is at the absolute heart of the resistance at the moment to many of these technologies. As I said, there really is an opportunity here to get communities and citizens more involved. There are roadmaps to draw upon from many different countries that have done this successfully. I set some of those out in the last slide of my presentation. Hopefully, that can inform the debate. This is the focus of my research in UCC and I would be very happy to come back and talk to the committee in a little bit more detail if it had a further session on this topic. I really believe that it is a key challenge to be addressed.