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

I think the Deputy is right that we do need to target more and in various ways. One way we will do that is with the new applications to the warmer home scheme We will do that once we have cleared the backlog, which will be done quickly, of 7,000 houses that built up during the pandemic. We are looking at the pre-1993 houses because the building regulations were changed in 1991. Houses from 1993 tend to be above a BER D+ standard. We are right to target those in that way.

The energy communities are the right way to do that. It is up to 600, I think, so it is starting to take off. That is a good mechanism but the Deputy is correct that we need to go further. The one-stop shop system will allow companies that are operating as such to do exactly what the Deputy is suggesting, namely to go in and aggregate and market this to a community as something where they can provide a community solution or aggregated response. Houses on an estate tend to all have the same fabric and energy structures. The one-stop shop is geared towards that kind of aggregation of response, which is the right way to go.

On the loan, I was really hopeful that we would have something like 3.5% which would be a remarkably low interest rate in the current circumstances. We do not have final confirmation of that.

One reason for the summer-early autumn date is that it is unprecedented that the EIB would be involved. It has never dealt in a loan system that is directly customer facing. We have to tick all the boxes, dot all the i's and cross all the t's in the European mechanism. It is on the edge of new, innovative financing. I am confident it is going to work and will be hugely beneficial. Even for people starting their work now, I am confident that it will be there in time for many who want to use it.

I agree about the potential use of smart metering as a mechanism. As I mentioned in reply to Deputy Bríd Smith, pushing the time of day pricing and ensuring it is used is one way in which we can reduce our use of fossil fuels, allow households to save money by their management of energy use and benefit from the investment we have made in the smart metering programme. That is the sort of measure we can look at. The Government will probably look at two steps. One is a more immediate response around the price issues we have now but beyond that the Department is looking at further ways by which we can accelerate or support energy efficiency measures. That type of example may be one where we would work with the CRU, ESB Networks and others. We can see if we can fast-track measures that we projected we would do in future and respond to this emergency crisis situation by advancing some of them now to help out householders. I would not rule that out.

I would have to check the technical aspects but I think that the Corrib field is halfway through its lifetime. It is the natural pressure from the field. Corrib is not a very large gas field. It was a fluke geologically. It had a salt cap on it and it does not have any neighbouring fields. It is a relatively simple pipeline connection into a processing centre. My expectation is that the pressure from the field would drive the output. It is not that easy to ramp up output and give us further supply.

We have other mechanisms. Some of our power stations are adjacent to our oil stocks, which are often in the form of distillate that can be burned in power stations. There would obviously have to be a connection. Poolbeg is one example where we have a combined cycle gas plant adjacent to some of our strategic oil stocks. That gives us some flexibility and capability. In addition to the national reserve, the other power stations also retain some fuel. We can change switch from gas to distillate and some of our oil reserves.

Even if we made a decision tomorrow on LNG and Shannon it would be a five- to ten-year delivery for anything and it would not address the immediate issue. The wider strategic issue there is looking at what is advancing increasingly rapidly across European countries, which is the conversion of renewables particularly, offshore wind, through electrolysis for hydrogen. I understand from the ESB is that it is very confident that any new power generation at Moneypoint, not as it now configured, or all new gas-fired power generation, will be hydrogen.

Those are some of the strategic questions we will have to look at. However, that will not address the immediate crisis. We have an immediate issue. We are in a better position than most other European countries as we were only reliant on Russian gas for 2% to 4% of our gas supply. We are more reliant on oil, at about 8% to 10%, and are now less reliant on coal. The Moneypoint contract with Russia has concluded and further coal will come in from Colombia or other locations. We are going to have to look at all those strategic matters but the more immediate issue is how we manage this and pushing efficiency and renewables as the immediate response to what is a fossil fuel induced crisis. Dependence on fossil fuel is our core weakness at the centre of this crisis.