Dr. David Connolly:

Completely. High density is fantastic for district heating networks. We have many new apartment blocks being built around the country at the moment. They would all be ideal customers for a district heating network. Some 70 million customers around Europe today are buying their heat from a district heating system. There is no technology leap required or anything like that. We have many communal systems, which Deputy Smith referred to earlier, which could quickly transition over if we had a network running by the font door. As my colleague, Ms Murphy, mentioned earlier, it would be really straightforward to equalise the heat pump grant for those customers. If they are making a decision for a complex of 200 apartments, they might get €4,500 per apartment to put in a heat pump but they get zero to put into district heating. They might be in a perfectly suitable area for district heating but they are being incentivised to do something different which will actually make it more difficult to put district heating into that area in the future. That may be one of the low-hanging fruit fixes.