Oireachtas Joint and Select Committees

Tuesday, 15 October 2024

Joint Oireachtas Committee on Climate Action

Update on the Public Sector Climate Action Mandate: Discussion

11:00 am

Mr. Declan Meally:

I thank Deputy Whitmore. That is a great project in Bray. We were delighted to support it and to work with Wicklow County Council on it. The short is answer is, yes, we look at it in that way, but what we do in working with our pathfinder partners is to start at the basics. We ask them why they need this energy in the first place and then we strip it back in terms of energy-efficient design. We have worked with the HSE and its designs in this regard. We ask what is the least amount of energy we need. It is then about understating what and how that can be met in relation to the redesign.

We do it with businesses and others. It is a case of asking at the very beginning, before going out to any procurement, whether they are designing right, that they are not just putting in solar panels to meet their current demand, whether they need that pump, whether it needs to be that size and why that energy is needed in the first place. All of that is taken right back to first principles in the very beginning. That is what we are doing in working with the public sector partners, to look at the design of those schools and working with the retrofit there to ask what they actually need.

Going beyond that and asking whether this could be a community project, there are opportunities. We have our communities programme and sustainable energy communities, of which there are a thousand in the country. We have been working together and getting them to ask those types of questions, such as whether we could locate a community project on the roof of a nursing home and whether it would be better there because the home could use it. That is where we are helping to train those people through the communities to look at the wider aspects of this. It is also a matter of getting the public bodies to consider their part in the community and to see how they could contribute. Part of it is, for example, district heating, where there are opportunities, and we have it in Tallaght with the data centre and we are using the energy to heat buildings. It is all about using the energy wisely within the community. That is the way we train and work with organisations.

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