Brian Leddin (Limerick City, Green Party) | Oireachtas source

I might ask some questions about the mini-generation scheme. It was good to hear about the uptake and the fact it is popular. The cap is 50 kW but it seems there are many businesses, in particular, that would certainly have roof space for solar and a demand for more power. The scheme, therefore, might not be ideal for them. Why is the cap 50 kW?

If you want to install more than 50 kW, the bureaucracy is different and there are different safety requirements, all of which add costs which may be prohibitive for people thinking about putting reasonably large systems on their premises. Is thought being given to increasing the cap beyond 50 kW?

I believe it was said that there had been an increase from 150 to 650 applications. I suspect that, given the current climate of high energy costs, this will increase exponentially. Are there plans to connect many more than that because it is still a very small percentage of prospective premises? We are talking about a cap of probably 20 MW or 30 MW but we could possibly get new capacity to the order of a few hundred megawatts through a scheme of this size.

There is also the related question of the resources ESB Networks put into processing these applications. It is one thing to say that so many new connections will be made but, if ESB Networks does not have the resources, it will take a long time. Given the current surge in interest - I find myself using electrical language such as "surge" and "current" all of the time - are more resources needed to process applications to the mini-generation scheme to get more people onto the network with their new solar installations? I have other questions on offshore generation but I will come back on those.