Dr. David Connolly:

Good morning to all. I thank the committee for having us here today. I will paraphrase rather than read verbatim because I find it easier to speak from the soul and off the top of my head rather than from a piece of paper. I will hopefully make four key points that it will be great to discuss in detail. A number of those points might surprise members immensely, but I can assure them that there is plenty of evidence to show that there is massive potential for district heating in Ireland.

The first point I would like to emphasise is scalability. District heating can be rapidly deployed at scale in Ireland far beyond what might be expected. Historically, we have struggled to build more than a few kilometres of pipework each year, whereas countries of similar size are building hundreds of kilometres of pipework to decarbonize their heat sectors each year. I am happy to go into that in some more detail later on.

The second point relates to the potential. We have seen analysis from a number of different bodies, such as the University of Flensburg in Germany and the Sustainable Energy Authority of Ireland, SEAI, which has shown that up to half of the buildings in Ireland are suitable for district heating. Not 1%, a few per cent, or 10%. Up to 50% of our building stock is in areas that would be deemed suitable to have a low-carbon heat network supplying their heat. That low-carbon aspect Ms Murphy mentioned is the critical part of that, and how these hot water networks will be supplied with low-carbon heat. That is all based on renewable heat and waste heat sources. I hope to go into this in more detail during the meeting, but I will give one example now. We waste more heat in Ireland than is needed to heat every building. Again, this is not a small amount of heat that is being wasted or a small percentage that we could potentially supply; this is enough waste heat to heat every urban building in Ireland multiple times over. That gives members a sense of the scale. The buildings are in the right areas and the potential to use low-carbon heat is enormous.

The third point is that there are a couple of significant barriers. We can talk about them in more detail later, but the main one is that it is actually not possible to apply for a licence to run a district heating pipe under a street in the same way that electricity cables, gas networks, cold water mains, or telecoms networks can be put in place. As can be imagined, that is a huge challenge to putting pipe working in place.

The final point I will make, and this is what really excites me about district heating, is that the supply chain exists. There are 500 TWh of district heating in Europe today. Our target is to have 2.7 TWh by 2030. We need to add 2.7 TWh on top of an existing market that is 500 TWh in size and that serves 70 million customers across Europe. This means that if we want to order something from the market, we could pick up a phone tomorrow and get what we need to start developing projects. I look forward to going into any of these points in more detail, but I truly believe this is an extremely exciting opportunity to decarbonise urban heat in Ireland.