Eamon Ryan (Dublin Bay South, Green Party) | Oireachtas source

I apologise, but I was in the Chamber as I had tabled a question to the Taoiseach. I have read the presentations. I will watch the video with interest.

On Mr. Bruton's final point, I attended the Bioenergy conference last week. It is absolutely clear that the industry has been completely stymied in the past four years and it looks like it will be later than 2019 before we benefit for state aid rules. We killed it for five years by holding out the expectation of this scheme, so that any customers will say that they will wait to benefit from that scheme, so the industry has been crippled for five years.

It is still going on. Mr. Brady will have heard me say at the Irish BioEnergy Association conference that we have just done the same to the solar industry. The Minister comes out, stating that he will introduce a roof top scheme, sometime in the summer and in every office of every single developer in the sector, the phone goes dead. Anybody thinking of entering a contract, thinks they should wait for that aid. That is a mistake we must stop in terms of trying to promote what should be a thriving industry.

I want to put a question to Mr. Brady, and again he would have heard me call for this, but it follows from an early presentation to the committee when Mr. Paul Kenny from the Tipperary Energy Institute made the very simple astute point that some 67% of new houses we are building, are being built with fossil fuel heating systems which in any scenario we will have to take out again in the next decade or two as we seek to meet our climate targets. That will be at the real expense of the householders. It is particularly frustrating when there are viable alternatives, such as solar water heating, geothermal, air heat pumps to name but a few. Is there a prospect, Mr. Brady, that the Department will be looking at introducing regulations where we will just stop the introduction of the fossil fuel heating systems in any house? In any industrial system, one could look at sustainable biomass for solution. Where are we continuing to go with oil and gas, when we have biomass and other renewable alternatives? It is the cheapest, quickest and easiest way of getting those industries back on their feet. Has the Department considered that? Will it consider it?

There are many areas I could go into, but I will focus on the future use of gas.

I read the presentation from the CEO of Ervia. Again, on a purely climate change science basis, we have heard presentations from international authorities showing the scale of the changes we must make to comply with the Paris Agreement. This means that we need to see an end to all fossil fuel production, particularly in the power generation sector where two thirds of energy is lost as waste heat. This is an incredibly wasteful use of a resource we should be limiting our use of. This brings me back to Deputy Dooley's question about the future of Moneypoint and peat-powered power stations because there seems to be no way one could justify a new gas-fired power station in Moneypoint to replace a coal-fired one. Regarding the argument that it helps us reach the climate targets, it might help us meet it in the very short term but these plants last 30 years. We are not going to, or cannot, use that gas plant in 30 years' time so why would we go with it, particularly at a time when, as Deputy Dooley said, we have a comparative competitive advantage in terms of very high wind speeds and a huge sea area? Surely that should be the future of Moneypoint as a connection point for off-shore wind energy and the use of DC cables to connect to continental and British markets as a way of playing our part in what the EU looks to do now, which is creating a north-west European regional market where we ship power over long distances and across markets. I cannot see how any rational energy approach would say we should go with gas rather than offshore wind. There are issues around inertia. This is a technical issue with which we must deal but I believe our engineers are capable of doing that far more quickly and more cheaply than the alternative Mr. Quinn seems to be advocating, which is that we might be able to find some CCS solution to the gas issue. Is there any working example of a CCS plant on the scale of Moneypoint that is in any way commercially viable? Could Mr. Quinn show me where it is working and who is developing it at scale? I would be very interested to see where that is happening.

I am very supportive of the concept of renewable gas - getting gas from waste products, anaerobic digestion and possibly from grass - but my understanding is that at best, even if we really maximised that gas from grass potential, it might provide at a maximum roughly 25% of current gas consumption. I understand that Ervia is now expanding its gas network in the midlands and surrounding counties. How is that happening? I also understood that we had really come to the end of building out our gas network and that there were no more significant commercially viable options in terms of extending our gas network. Given that we may be facing a future where our gas supply is restricted to a renewable supply by 75% for climate change reasons, how is it that Ervia is expanding its gas network now? Why are we looking at two new LNG terminals in Shannon and Cork, which I can only presume is to import American fracked gas, which is a threat to climate? Why is Ervia talking about new gas-fired power stations? How can that in any way live with the climate science reality that says we must switch from gas just as much as other fossil fuels because the carbon from it will be in the atmosphere for several hundred or thousand years and we must stop putting that carbon up there?