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

-----it just works. It is an incredibly efficient system. It is incredibly cost-effective. In a country such as Ireland, where we have so much renewable wind power and we have the ability to switch it on and off in response to the wind, the prize is that we would have one of the most efficient, clean and economic systems going. Heat pumps are being used throughout the world. I was proud to co-chair a meeting of the International Energy Agency yesterday on the gas crisis. So many Ministers said we need the industrial output of heat pumps in order to facilitate a massive expansion. This technology is taking off across the world, and it will work here. Heat pumps are like fridges. We do not need to go near them, they do not break down that much and they work very well.

On their own, heat pumps will not be enough because many buildings may not be suitable. There is also real benefit from district heating. According to the heat study, up to half of housing could use district heating if we really went for it. We are always looking at Denmark but it has shown how district heating can work in a way that is good for householders. It is very efficient and economic. These two will be the mainstay. As Deputy O'Sullivan said, there may be examples where local anaerobic digestion could lead to gas-fired systems but that would be very local. The demand for heat is great. We must be very careful about promising that something like this could deliver the scale of heat that we would need.

Then we come to the likes of hydrogenated vegetable oils. The concern here is that there is a limited supply and we must be careful about where the supply is from. We must be very careful that it is not from a source that leads to the destruction of rainforests in a far distant part the world. There is a valuable and viable environmental source from waste oils, cooking oil, tallow and other materials. The area where we have the bigger challenge is probably transport. This comes back to what I said earlier about transport being the most difficult issue. If there is a limited quantity of hydrogenated vegetable oils, which there will be, rather than using them in heating, it would be better to use them in the transport sector, where we have hard-to-crack problems in respect of the likes of haulage. This is why there is such an emphasis on heat pumps and district heating as the way forward.