Dr. Oliver Kinnane:

To repeat and maybe add something, when we talk about buildings, we are talking about really complex systems with lots going on and many varying parameters within them. When we try to reductively reduce the national development plan to wrapping buildings in insulation and maybe putting heat pumps into some of them, it is a very simple solution to a very complex problem. That is where the performance gap comes from. It is almost impossible to believe you could take a G rated building of 450 kW hours per metre squared per year one year, and then move it up to a 25 kW hours per metre squared per year following just installation of 100 mm of insulation wrap or something like that. What we need is holistic thinking and a much broader thinking on retrofit. That needs to be matched with more nuanced or a greater complexity to our regulation because the regulations have very much focused on the thermal resistance of the fabric and the constant reduction of that as a solution whereas we have many different matters that need to be considered, such as ventilation, dampness and heating systems and the balance between these. The general answer to the question is, as I said earlier, we do not know nearly as much as we think we know about buildings. There is a lack of knowledge and a lack of evidence. We do not have the data. We have written studies that have looked at cohorts of 12 to 20 buildings and said that a certain percentage of them perform below their design value but that may or may not be representative of the national average. We do not have that data. Getting that data would be really useful to bring greater understanding about where we are going here.

To echo the Deputy's fear with the national retrofit plan, my fear is that we rush to retrofit without having the evidence and the knowledge that we are doing the right thing. The SEAI has been given much more funding in recent times and it is funding what we hope is good research. For example, we are doing a big study for it on traditional building fabrics and trying to monitor the thermal and hydrothermal, the moisture related properties of those fabrics. We will be able to feed that back to make recommendations about retrofit of those buildings and particularly complex building typologies. We are at a very early stage in our understanding of buildings.

Around the world we are rushing to retrofit without the necessary evidence and knowledge base. There are certain things we can do but we need not to think that we are going to solve it overnight. In that case, we would create the situation where we have to retrofit again the retrofit buildings.