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

The Deputy is correct that the sectoral targets will have to add up to 51% within the legislation. We have committed to that. Deputy Bríd Smith said that it is just in our minds. The reality is that this legislation was developed with the Ministers for Agriculture, Food and the Marine and Enterprise, Trade and Employment. It will be done by the Ministers in the next Government too. It is not a light legislative tool but a straitjacket. It is an iterative process. We do not know exactly what technological innovations there will be. Some things will work better than others and we have to accelerate those and switch. There will be a role in both setting the sectoral targets, listening to the Oireachtas and Government colleagues, and, on an ongoing basis, with the CCAC and the Ministers having to adapt and adopt different strategies, depending on whether they have been successful or not. That straitjacket is tight because we are looking to implement an incredibly ambitious change.

One thing coming out of COP26 in Glasgow at the weekend is that we will not be alone in doing this. If we do not do it, we will be behind. Those countries that succeed in doing this will be the new leading, future-oriented economies. This will be good for our country. It is inevitable that it is coming. Not a single country at COP26 said that it did not want to help with the 1.5° C target. That means halving emissions this decade and reaching net zero by 2050, straight down the middle. This is incredibly ambitious and has never been done before, but it is the right thing to do economically. The budgets and the sectoral targets will steer us in that direction.

A question for the committee to consider is whether the balance is right between the first half and the second half; I think it is. There is some flexibility in the 4 million tonnes that we have put in as being unallocated on page 14. Those will accrue in the second half of the decade, since it is then that land use rules will change to allow us to use some of that. This is complicated. My initial and ongoing assessment is that the broad budget approach is correct. We will have to agree that, then agree the sectoral targets, which will be a challenge.

Regarding the scale of ambition for offshore wind, there is no doubt that the UK is ahead of us and most other countries. It is interesting to see that similar countries, including the Netherlands, Belgium and Denmark, are probably four or five years ahead of us, but we developed and delivered an onshore renewable system that is world leading. Our integration of renewable energy is probably the most advanced. EirGrid manages a large part of our onshore wind energy and it is truly groundbreaking. We are ahead of the game and other countries with that. We had to do land-based generation first because offshore generation was expensive. The price has decreased in the past four or five years. We can now expect it to be truly economic and to have it at scale.

We needed to do land-based wind first because offshore wind was very expensive. It has come down in price in the past four to five years. Now we can expect it to be truly economic and we have it at scale.

I would not limit ourselves to 5 GW of offshore wind. If we can find that flowing offshore develops quicker than people think - it could well do that - and we find ourselves delivering the first phase and the second phase, I see no reason in the third phase that we should not scale up. The overall target is for 35 GW of offshore wind. That is a huge amount. That is six or seven times our current demand. There is no shortage of ambition. There is no restriction on the development, other than environmental ones and also sharing and using it. There is no point in generating wind if we are just spilling it all the time.

We must build the North-South interconnector. The committee knows that will come soon. More critically, we will build the interconnector with the UK - the Greenlink project - by 2023, I understand, coming into Wexford. It looks as though, going well, the French interconnector will be coming in in 2025 or 2026. We are engaging in talks with a number of European countries and the UK about further grid interconnection with a view to us being able to balance our system to share some of this very significant power resource we have. There is no shortage of ambition. It will scale up as fast as we can do so but we have to get the first steps right. We need to get the projects on the east coast built, and that will not be easy. There will be real planning issues. I am quite certain on that but we will have to approach that and trust in the independence of the planning system to make the calls. Then, as I said, within this decade, it will be moving into southern waters and western waters. There is no shortage.

With regard to finance flows, in answer to the third question, the other significant thing coming out of Glasgow is that the financial industry has given a clear signal that it will be switching out of fossil fuels and all financial flows now will be measured for their carbon performance. There was significant development in the proposed reform of the multilateral development banks - the World Bank and the IMF - and also the use of assets such as special drawing rights which will be significant, particularly for developing countries. In our own environment, it is more likely to be the issuing of green bonds because that is where we would be able to get the lowest cost finance. The scale of the investment by EirGrid to fund offshore wind and offshore grid will be very large. It is an extra €1 billion to meet the 2023 plan, according to their estimate, but there will also be significant investment from the ESB on the distribution grid. A large part of that will be funded effectively by green bonds because they are regulated assets and because EirGrid and the ESB are seen as professional highly-skilled delivery companies. That is a significant part of that €165 billion national development plan. "Yes" is the answer. We will be using green bonds in a variety of different ways.