Ms Avril N? Shearcaigh:

I hate to disappoint the Senator but the Aran Islands Energy Co-operative is actually in its 11th year, or heading towards its 12th year now. We were established in 2012. We were originally a group of islanders who sat on various committees under the local development co-ops but who recognised that energy was something much wider that deserved an organisation of its own to focus on it as its primary concern. Our shareholders are only residents and businesses on the three Aran Islands. Membership in our co-operative is €100 for lifetime membership. We have been looking at different projects since 2012.

We would have originally been responsible for co-ordinating the retrofit of homes on the islands. We took part in a pilot scheme of the SEAI in 2012 and 2013, which was a pilot of its better energy communities programme, which it later rolled out nationwide. We were the co-ordinators of that and we project-managed it at the time. That model was successful for us for a couple of years but it also carried a huge amount of risk for a non-profit organisation with no income. We had a potential liability at one stage of over €1 million because we had the contract with the SEAI and we were dependent on the SEAI paying out the grant. If, for any reason, it did not pay out a portion of the grant, we were left liable to pay the contractor. Similarly, we had the contract with the homeowners and it left us wide open in terms of insurance and finances. It was far too difficult for us to co-ordinate and project-manage that as such a small organisation without the technical skill sets, as we are not all engineers on the board or anything. We have since moved away from that model. We recognised that we needed the people with the right skill sets to lead these projects.

For a number of years we then successfully ran the retrofitting programmes with a contractor leading the application. We did a lot of the background work and supported the contractor in making the application, collecting the information from all of the households and working closely with both parties, and then they made the application directly to the SEAI. That worked well but you are at the mercy of just one contractor and then you start running into issues of competition. Eventually the contractor was no longer interested in working on the islands because it presented a lot more complications in logistics, accommodation, travel to and from the islands and so on. It chose not to submit an application for the island and then we were left with nothing and we were looking for contractors that were willing to take on that role again, which was not easy. We found it much easier in 2012, 2013 and 2014 to get contractors out to the islands because it was post recession and there was not as much work happening on the mainland. Now that there is more of a shortage of construction workers on the mainland it is getting harder and harder all of the time to get those contractors onto the island. We have looked at different ways to mitigate this. We have taken part in a EU LIFE project called local energy agencies in peripheral regions, LEAP, which is just at the beginning and in its early days. Through that project we have established three separate energy agencies: one in Donegal; one in Sligo and Leitrim; and one for the Conamara Gaeltacht and the islands. The staff in that agency have just been appointed so they are just in the very early days of that. We are hoping that will be a solution. These are people with the skills and expertise to manage these projects and we hope we will be able to bundle projects on the islands in with projects on the mainland, and hopefully make it more enticing for contractors. That is our way of trying to tackle that issue.

Second, the Senator asked about the small turbines on homes. I agree that there is a huge opportunity for them. Generally, when we do not have good sunshine in the winter months and in the leaner months, the turbines will work well. There is room for both PV and smaller domestic turbines on homes. We have looked at this and I have seen an example of it in Ireland but it is not on a house that is connected to the national grid; it is a totally off-grid home that uses PV and a small domestic wind turbine to power the home, along with battery storage. It is an exciting thing to see working. My understanding is that it is not possible at the moment to install it in your home if you are connected to the grid. You need to have a specific agreement in place with ESB Networks before you install anything like that onto its system. There needs to be more work done on that side of it in order for people to be able to install such technologies. They are not new or experimental technologies; they work well all over the world. From that point of view there is little to investigate because we know that turbines work well and we know that wind is a resource that we have in abundance on the islands and along the coast. The work needs to be done on the other end of it to make it easier for people to install those technologies. There are distributors of small domestic turbines in the country already so we are not that far off, if the will is there to make it happen. I agree that it is something we should definitely be looking at.