Mr. Mark Griffin:

I will continue on the electric vehicle theme, on which SEAI has started the discussion. We have in place a low emissions vehicle task force which has done a considerable amount of work in that area. There is a range of supports in place, with which the committee is probably familiar. They include VRT relief of €5,000, a purchase grant of €5,000 for electric vehicles, a new grant of €600 that we introduced at the start of the year to support the installation of a home charger, a benefit-in-kind rate of zero per cent for battery electric vehicles, a low motor tax rate, a grant of up to €7,000 to support the use of electric vehicles which has been taken up by a number of taxi, hackney and limousine operators and a discount on tolls of 50% for BEVs and 25% for PHEVs. There is a considerable amount of work ongoing in that space. We are very conscious that moving from having 6,000 electric vehicles on the road to 500,000 by 2030 will require a further major transformation. There is a lot of work to be done by the group in looking at issues such as the building regulations, the planning regulations and how, for example, one can attach an EV charging point to street lighting, etc.

On the home charger grant, to reflect the level of enthusiasm since the scheme was introduced, we have approved 740 applications. Payment is pending in 209 cases, while 498 grants have been paid. Therefore, there have been approximately 1,500 applications under a scheme that was introduced in January or February this year. We have paid 21 grants to the NTA for use of electric vehicles in the taxi, hackney and limousine sector.

The point that charging infrastructure is critical is correct. We understand a decision is likely to issue from the Commission for the Regulation of Utilities that will confirm in more detail the role of the ESB in respect of existing e-car infrastructure and provide greater clarity on how it will manage a programme of scale. We have made provision in the €500 million climate action fund for organisations to bid for EV charging infrastructure and expect a number of such applications in the first tranche.

Going back to the first point raised by the Senator on research and development, we have invested €31 million in the ocean energy sector since 2013. It has funded a number of schemes in counties Mayo, Galway and Cork, including the Galway Bay test site, the Atlantic marine renewable energy test site in County Mayo and the tank scale site in County Cork.

We have a further €4.75 million to be spent on ocean energy research in 2018. If one broadens it out into the research programmes more generally, the SEAI has done a lot of research on the prototype development scheme. There is a new behavioural economics unit in place in the SEAI, which will be really important in creating the shift and dealing with some of the inertia that exists in terms of moving to some of the new technologies. We have an internal energy research budget ourselves and we fund a substantial research programme for the Environmental Protection Agency, EPA. We are not short of money. We remain very committed to ensuring that we are at the cutting edge. We work very closely with academic institutions on the research agenda generally.

On Bord na Móna and the just transition, I know for a fact that the new chair and CEO are acutely conscious of that and they either have or will shortly bring to the board a proposal for what Bord na Móna might look like in 2030 when it is shifting out of the peat business in the coming years. If he is looking at the transmission of this meeting, Tom Donnellan, the CEO, probably will not thank me for saying it but Bord na Móna is hugely involved in that process. As an organisation that will be very deeply affected by the carbon transition, it might be no harm to ask Bord na Móna in for a chat to see what it is doing because there is a lot of creative thinking about how to harness the natural resources and use people who have been involved in energy in the midlands to see how the organisation might look in the next decade, post a transition to a lower-carbon Bord na Móna.

On the biomass issue, Bord na Móna is very involved in investigating how to increase the indigenous biomass supply. It is looking at agricrops, principally willow, forestry by-products, including thinnings and branch pulpwood, as the main sources of biomass material. All the biomass used by Bord na Móna is fully in compliance with EU sustainability standards. The pressure remains to get the supply chain right and how one builds a domestic biomass capacity to ensure that in time, one is not reliant on imports because the imports themselves have a carbon impact. Bord na Móna is looking at a whole suite of issues.

We have our own bioenergy plan. Deputies Eamon Ryan and Catherine Martin tabled a number of parliamentary questions in recent days as to where we stand on that. Mr. Manley will speak a little about it. There has been a number of very significant developments on the biomass and bioenergy front since that plan was originally conceived. We want to ensure that the plan that emerges ultimately makes sense, as it will have to be part of the feed-in to the national energy and climate plan.

Another big thing that is happening in terms of biomass and renewable heat is the SSRH. I am not sure what the acronym stands for.