Denis Naughten (Roscommon-Galway, Independent) | Oireachtas source

I have a couple of questions, but before I come to those, I welcome Emma Lynch from Clarin College in Athenry who is in the Houses of the Oireachtas this week on transition year work experience. She is very welcome in experiencing the engagement here at the committee today.

To correct the record with regard to something earlier, there was a retrofit and a deep retrofit programme here prior to three and a half years ago. We had a number of pilot retrofits in which Mr. Boland was involved. We announced the capital allocation in January of 2018 to deep retrofit 45,000 homes per year. Sadly, there was a delay in the implementation of that because of Covid-19, but the funding and commitment has been there for a considerable time.

I will turn to a few questions, first of all to EnergyCloud, with regard to the evidence that was given regarding the curtailment and the financial impact of that. Based on the different remuneration schemes that are in place for renewable energy, the reality is that some of the public service obligation, PSO, is being used to pay for some of that curtailed electricity, particularly on the earlier projects. Have we any idea of how much money people are paying through the PSO for curtailed electricity? I know it is not a simple question, but the witnesses might give us some indication in that regard.

On the curtailment, Mr. Mullins made the point that we are looking at 15% of all our renewable electricity being curtailed in the not-too-distant future. The difficulty is that this is not universal across the country. If we go to the periphery, that is, the west coast and especially the north west of Ireland, a substantial proportion of that electricity is being curtailed. It would be nice to see that electricity being utilised locally. We have all dealt with it, including Senator Murphy and myself, in terms of concerns by local communities around wind farms being constructed in their community. Here is an opportunity to provide free electricity or free heat to those homes. It is something that can be done, particularly in the context of the community fund. The regulation and legislation is there now. It is a matter of the Department of the Environment, Climate and Communications looking at how it can work with the companies in that regard.

What I found interesting is the fact that on one third of the nights in 2023, electricity was being curtailed in this country. Electricity was being wasted in this country. This is expensive electricity we put in place in terms of the capital infrastructure. What this committee is looking at is not just dealing with the water tanks but going beyond that. Another Irish company, GlenDimplex, has the technology now where that curtailed electricity could actually be put into quantum storage heaters at night. However, there is also the opportunity for the owners of those quantum storage heaters to sell it back to the grid during the day so that people could get energy credits or electricity credits, which would be far more acceptable than large-scale battery storage or in combination with large-scale battery storage. The difficulty we have here is actually bringing all the aspects of this together.

A very interesting point was made this morning by Ms McDonnell regarding people managing their day-to-day chores now based on electricity demand. It is a pity the energy regulator in this country did not take a leaf out of EnergyCloud's book because even though we have 1.6 million smart meters installed in this country, we were informed last week that only 300,000 people have registered to actually get the data off those. Clearly, therefore, the energy regulator has been sitting on its hands for the past seven years in actually trying to maximise the utilisation of that data and giving that information and those tools to people. EnergyCloud has been able to do that with very constrained levels of funding as a charity in being able to relay and explain that to some of the most deprived communities and individuals in this country. As I said, the regulator could take a leaf out of its book. How many homes have been connected at the moment through EnergyCloud? What are the numbers?