Mr. Declan Meally:

The Senator asked a general question about grant levels then talked about the street light pilot. My colleague referred to that. There have been many discussions with local authorities about those pilots, including Dún Laoghaire-Rathdown County Council. The issue with street lights is that they do not receive sufficient energy to power the EV chargers. We need to look at whether there are trickle opportunities to use this model. Street lights are not metered, so a meter cabinet has to be installed. There are some technical, regulatory and physical issues that are being worked on with the local authorities. Fingal and the other Dublin authorities have come up with a strategy. They have been looking at options for charging hubs.

We believe the grant incentives are where they should be. We, the Department and the Minister constantly review them to determine what should be upgraded. We have changed the incentives over the years. We started off providing commercial and private grants. The commercial grant was dropped because there was an opportunity for benefit-in-kind and there was no need for an additional incentive. As battery electric vehicles now have a longer range, we did not need to incentivise plug-in hybrids, which already had an ICE. The idea is for the funding available from the Government to target battery electric vehicles. The €5,000 currently there is constantly under review. It will not be there forever. There should be price parity with petrol and diesel vehicles in 2024 or 2025. The cost of running, buying and servicing an internal combustion engine is higher than an electric car. It is cheaper to run an electric vehicle. We are aiming to incentivise the markets.

We have changed the grant schemes over the last couple of years. They were online. The home grant applications are much easier and more straightforward online. They can be processed relatively quickly. It used to be that it took up to ten days to approve a grant for vehicle charges. That is now instant. Somebody would have to come in, look at a car, go away to think about it, get a grant offer and then come back in again. A dealer can now get grant approval immediately when the customer is on the forecourt. All of those changes have happened following a series of developments in the grant scheme. They are constantly under review. Mr. Brennan was running the programmes and I will let him come in.