Oireachtas Joint and Select Committees

Thursday, 29 June 2017

Committee on Budgetary Oversight

Capital Investment: European Investment Bank

10:00 am

Mr. Andrew McDowell:

Absolutely. We are engaging in some preliminary discussions here in that regard but are further ahead with them in many other European countries and have financed many operations, particularly in the area of energy efficiency, which absolutely requires aggregators. The difficulty in regard to energy efficiency projects is they tend to be very fragmented, small-scale individual projects where individuals do not have the necessary expertise or incentive to do it themselves and it needs professional aggregators to bring projects together to a scale that can be financed by the EIB. We are doing that very successfully in several European countries and are engaging in discussions here in that regard but the process is slightly further behind.