Mr. Cathal Lee:

That is a great question. Last June was a landmark moment for Fingal County Council and EnergyCloud. It was the first local authority to commence a project. To date, it has been focused on existing homes, for example, the one-hour retrofit. Mr. Mullins referenced getting homes EnergyCloud-ready in his opening statement. From a simple point of view, you can spec this in for all new homes so that you do not have to do a one-hour retrofit. Regarding the national retrofit programme, which was referenced in the submission, and the existing new build programmes - even the ones exclusively funded by the State through the local authorities or approved housing bodies - if you did nothing else but suggest that those homes are EnergyCloud-enabled, that would mean that there would be no need for a knock on the door two years down the road for an electrician to do a one-hour retrofit. You just spec it in as standard. The key thing there is that it is using the existing infrastructure and tradespeople. There is an acute shortage of tradespeople so if you can be efficient in terms of doing this at new build phase or retrofit stage, it can be hugely useful.

One of the programmes that is about to start with EnergyCloud and a small approved housing body involves doing the installations of part of the approved housing body's ongoing maintenance across the small number of homes it has. Different local authorities will do it differently based on their own programmes but the Deputy's suggestion that it be specced in at the start is probably where legislators and influencers across the entire value chain should be focusing because that is the one that can have greatest medium-term impact with regard to Deputy Ó Cathasaigh's earlier point rather than having to knock on the door a second time with regard to a house.