Mr. Oisín Coghlan:

I thank Senator Paul Daly for the question. I will say a few words about the bit I skipped over in my presentation. There is real scope in energy, in particular, for win-win-wins. I am sure the committee has heard this already. In some senses it is the least sexy of them all but the area where the most difference can be made is in energy efficiency by not using as much energy in our homes. The European Commissioner for Climate Action and Energy, Mr. Miguel Arias Cañete, said that the dollar of energy not used is the best one of all.

We built one third of our housing stock during the boom and not to the highest standards. We have to retrofit at least 1 million homes and probably more over the next 12 years but we get significant benefits when we do that. In a funny way we do not have to talk about it being a climate thing. We get a much more stable climate inside a house when heat pumps are used compared with old fashioned up and down with boilers. The air is cleaner, the homes are healthier, the fuel bills are lower as are the emissions. Perhaps Mr. Stanley-Smith might speak about this as he had a deep retrofit done by the Tipperary Energy Agency. It is a transformative experience for a house but it is a big deal. It is not only a grant that is needed but also project management support to help choose the right contractor etc.

We have to do that at a scale of a million homes. That is at least 100,000 homes a year for the next decade. It is good that the national development plan referred to resources for this but the question is what mechanism gets people engaged. I am not stuck on this but as a thought experiment, I have used the analogy of something like the special savings incentive account, SSIA. First, if it is €2 billion per year for the next ten years, that is not all going to be State money. We have to get household investment involved and we also must think about households in fuel poverty, as well as low-income households and give them more support. For the majority of households it needs to be a scheme that gets them spending their own money while also getting some State help. What has done that the most in the last 20 years is the SSIA scheme.

It was in a sense like taking off value added tax, VAT. For every €4 invested, there was a €1 return after five years. It was the simplicity of the offer that attracted people. We need something like an SSIA scheme for insulation where for every €4 a householder invests in a deep retrofit, he or she gets a €1 subsidy from the State. I refer to something that is this simple to understand and which is rolled out at a scale that allows us to get to 100,000 houses a year. I know from the small bits of home improvements I have done that project management is the other side of that coin. Getting something done to the outside of a house is one thing but when the fabric of the home is being reworked inside, the householder needs to trust the contractor. He or she needs to know what is happening and needs guidance.

Sustainable Energy Authority of Ireland schemes do not offer that level of support at present whereas the Tipperary Energy Agency deep retrofit scheme - now a kind of national pilot scheme - does give that type of support. It does the assessment with the householder and then offers two or three contractors that the householder knows are up to the job. That makes it so much easier. It is essentially like accompaniment by a supportive agency through the process. Mr. Stanley-Smith might talk more about the experience. That is one side.

The second is renewables. We are often critical of Government policy in my job but we have welcomed the renewable electricity support scheme. It is a genuine attempt to operationalise the commitments to renewables and community involvement in the White Paper. There is, however, one crucial bit missing for real public engagement. I mentioned it in passing and that is the idea of a payment for solar electricity that can be spilled to the grid from a solar panel. There is a small grant now for putting a solar panel on a house as a householder but we think that community buildings and farm buildings are the real front line. I want every school in the country to be not just a green school but a solar school with a solar panel on the roof. That is not just because schools can save on their energy bills and then spend more on whiteboards and education because fuel bills are currently paid for from capitation. It is because it is a real way to engage the community in energy. On a sunny day, the meter in the lobby of the school would be going backwards. There would be real possibilities for engagement. Perhaps some fundraising might be done to put the panels on.

They could get a real gain from it. It involves the State giving a payment for the solar energy they spill onto the grid, as schools are not used at weekends or during the summer. If they cannot be paid for it, as is the case currently, it does not become economically viable. Equally, for GAA clubs, parish and community halls and farm buildings, it is a real way to get the vast majority of communities involved. We know that is at the community level where Ireland shows that it is best; it takes in the Tidy Towns competition, GAA clubs and parish groups. That is where the real action is. If we can harness that energy to help us to engage in the transition, the game will change. There would also be a stream of revenue for rural communities, in particular. It is not purely about megawatts as that will not resolve our issues in meeting overall targets. It will, however, change the discussion. We will get past the discussion we have had about big corporate wind energy projects for the past ten years into a real societal project involving transition and transformation. These two elements would make a big physical difference to people's lives and the conversation.

Mr. Stanley-Smith and I mentioned peat in passing. Peatlands are our Amazon. We are burning them in order to produce electricity, which is very inefficient. Peat gives us 9% of our electricity but 23% of the pollution caused by electricity generation. We must stop using it. We were first told to stop 20 years ago by consultants hired by the Government to tell us how to meet our targets. We need to do it in a just transition and cannot just abandon the workers. I have used the analogy before that when a US company pulls out, overnight a task force will be set up by the Minister and the Taoiseach, with all of the agencies, employers, the trade unions and local groups. We need that now for the peat sector in the midlands, with a target date to come off peat of two, three or four years. It should involve the community and the sector should ask what kind of future it wants. We should use the subsidy that currently goes to the sector and some of the revenue from the carbon tax to fund the transition and ensure the workers and communities will have the opportunities to envisage a sustainable and prosperous future.