Ms Marie Donnelly:

Government has a big role to play. Members of the Oireachtas have a big role to play. This is where they should say that this is what they want and they want it by a certain date, and they should get on with it. There should be no acceptance of delay or prevarication or anything else. Smart metering was mentioned, and Ireland is in arrears on smart metering. We were supposed to have achieved the full roll-out of smart metering by 2020, but we will start only next year, with 250,000 as a pilot project. The services linked to smart metering will come on stream only ten months later, and then there will be a progressive roll-out. I understand why the regulator in Ireland has done that. It is careful and cautious. What I do not understand, however, is if, for example, I ask for a smart meter in the morning - I asked but was told they were not available - I want to be able to avail of the services of the smart meter now. I do not want to have it in my house for a year before I can get the benefits out of it. It is a question of trying to put oneself in the position of the individual whom we are asking to take on new technology, which can be of huge benefit, but whom we are telling we are not ready to give the benefits to yet. We need to get our act together and say, "There it is. You can have the benefits straight away." These kinds of things need to come together. I do not want the lights to go out but a little bit less caution moving forward could be useful. We have an intelligent population who are well able to manage all of these issues, and we could do it.

Regarding the Netherlands, the Dutch Government went into an agreement with both industry and agriculture on mechanisms of climate change and the response to climate change. It set up a deal as to what would be achieved and what it would do with both the policy framework and the financial elements. One illustration is that the Netherlands economy had historically run on gas because it had its own gas from the North Sea, but that gas is almost depleted. In Groningen, the output had to be reduced by 75% because there were earthquakes in the locality. It has to move out of gas, therefore, and that message is clear in the Dutch mind. What will they do? Much of the agriculture, especially the flowers and the glasshouses, has been run with gas. To tackle the problem, it has decided to go for geothermal heating for the glasshouses on a collective basis. The Government is supporting the shift of the energy source to geothermal for the glasshouse industry so as to be able to move away from gas. That is a whole-industry shift done in collaboration with the Government in a planned and structured way. There are grants involved in it as well, but they are naturally compliant with State aid.

On changing the heating system in rural areas, the Deputy is correct. Oil heating is largely a rural problem in Ireland because there is no gas grid there anyway. It is not easy. We should not be too optimistic about the speed at which it can happen. If we take 33 years, which is a long time, we can look at some of the realities of housing in Ireland. We have a churn rate of our houses in Ireland of approximately 20 years whereas in Belgium, where a house is sold every 58 years, nobody moves. Basically one builds a house, one moves into it and one dies. In Ireland, however, we know many people who have lived in two or three houses, so the churn rate in Ireland is much higher. We have an opportunity to take action at the point of churn. I was talking about the mortgage and how one could build into the mortgage a little icing on the cake that could handle the retrofit. It is an opportunity to take our own national characteristic and see if we can do something to get that across.

We might take heat pumps as an example. They are more expensive than oil and gas boilers. They are too expensive in this country because we do not have the volume to get the price down. If there was the equivalent of the Tipperary Energy Agency, TEA, in every county, and public procurement rules were used to buy, say, 100 heat pumps and get a volume discount on the price, and if they were then made available to one's own people in one's own county at that lower price, it would bring down the price of the heat pump. It is perfectly legitimate and can be done using public procurement rules, and is simply made available to people in their own area. There are ways where collective action can make the cost of this change lower. The other issue is seeing, feeling and touching. It is important that people can see what it looks like when the job is done. Then they can start to think about what it might look in their own house if they did it, what it would cost and what would be involved. Maybe if they changed their windows five years ago, they would not need to do it, but there are different ways to do it.

On offshore energy, licensing and consenting procedures need to be put in place, and we will have to get agreement on landfall for the grid. We will also have to get agreement on who will pay for the grid. Will it be the developer such as in the UK, or will it be the EirGrid, as in the Netherlands and Belgium, for example? These are questions to answer. When one looks at our demand for electricity going forward, three factors will increase the volume. First, if we shift heating and transport from fossil fuels into electricity, demand will increase. Second, it is projected that we will experience a population increase of almost 1 million over the next couple of decades, which is a 20% increase in population.

Third, the number of planning applications for data centres indicates demand will increase by more than 50% over the next ten years. Much of the increase in demand for electricity in Ireland will be the result of large companies needing large volumes of electricity. This lends itself to what is called corporate power purchase agreements, PPAs, where large corporations purchase their power directly from large producers, for example, offshore wind producers. This means it is funded through the corporate side of business without subsidy from the taxpayer. This approach involves a radical thought process but the opportunity exists to use the corporate entity. We now have the RE100 operating globally. This is a collection of large companies, including Microsoft and Apple, that are committed to using 100% renewable energy, including in their supply companies. They are prepared to invest in wind farms and take the off tech as a commercial corporate activity over time. We have an opportunity to think about what is the nature of our demand profile on the island and what is our potential opportunity for offshore wind. We could then match the two as an opportunity going forward. That is just a thought. It is in the early stages but there are possibilities that could be developed.