Donnchadh Ó Laoghaire (Cork South Central, Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

Go raibh míle maith agaibh go léir. This is really fascinating stuff.

I will be as efficient as possible. I have three questions for EnergyCloud and one for Irish Rural Link. First, I had heard a little about what EnergyCloud does in advance of this meeting and from reading about it. It is really impressive and quite ingenious and creative and the scale of the increase, the fact the first homes were only connected in 2021 and that EnergyCloud Ireland is already at 70,000 homes, is quite remarkable. It is a really rapid growth in the roll-out so I congratulate it. It is an excellent use of the energy that is there.

In terms of the potential beneficiaries, I appreciate Clúid and its housing stock is a significant part of that, but how are potential beneficiaries identified? Are they primarily with local authorities or with approved housing bodies? This is difficult to achieve but I am conscious of the fact that a lot of the discussions we have had over the last couple of sessions is how some of the people most at risk of energy poverty are those in low-quality private rented accommodation. They are probably a bit harder to reach. Maybe EnergyCloud has some of them within its envelope; I do not know. Certainly, a lot of our discussions in recent weeks have focused on that. A lot of them are in poor quality homes that would have been built 50 or 60 years ago that are more difficult to heat and obviously, they cannot access some of the retrofit programmes unless they have an obliging landlord.

I am not an electrician or an engineer so I do not necessarily understand the ins and outs of this. As I understand it, the signal goes out, the people who are beneficiaries or customers - I am not sure what language EnergyCloud uses - are notified and then they know they have free energy they can use; hot water in particular. Is EnergyCloud able to get a sense of what the level of response to that is? How much of that additional energy that is surplus is then taken up by the people who are beneficiaries of EnergyCloud?

Finally, from EnergyCloud's point of view, it occurs to me that in the longer run, wind energy is an area in which there will only be growth. There are people in Cork, and Mr. Lee will be familiar with this, who think of the potential of floating offshore to Cork and I am sure there are similar thoughts in Shannon and Limerick that it can be what the pharmaceutical industry was 30 or 40 years ago. There will only be growth in floating offshore but from a departmental point of view, a surplus in unused energy is not necessarily always a good thing. There obviously will be the desire to export surplus energy as time goes on. Perhaps there might be but will there always be an adequate surplus that can be redirected? Will there always be that spare capacity in the system or is there the possibility that as we look to France, Britain and other places we are supporting, the big picture will affect in a detrimental way what EnergyCloud is trying to do with the surplus? There may be two competing interests there but perhaps not.

I thank Ms Lennon and Mr. Boland from Irish Rural Link. We talked about some of the poor-quality homes in privately rented accommodation. A lot of that happens in rural areas as well. Certainly in my office, while my constituency is primarily urban, I increasingly see people who cannot get housing assistance payment, HAP, properties in the city move further and further out to rent privately in rural areas. The other thing that occurs to me from a rural point of view is that understandably, local authorities like economies of scale so when they are planning a retrofitting programme of local authority housing they like to do a whole estate or a flat complex. There are many villages or rural areas where there are four local authority houses in a street of 12 houses, or where there are one or two local authority houses. In the past, following on from the labourers' cottages of old, county councils would have built five or six houses in a village. They are probably low enough down on the pecking order when a local authority applies for retrofitting funding. Is that an experience Irish Rural Link is having? Is any retrofitting happening or if there is are - as I perceive they might be - local authority tenants in rural areas at the bottom of the pecking order?