Mr. Paul Kenny:

I thank the Chair for asking us to present here today. Our statement covers many of the same points Mr. Barry has raised, so I will try not to cover the same topics more than is necessary. The Tipperary Energy Agency has spent the past 15 years renovating homes to a high energy standard with a lot of support from the State. With regard to the renovation challenge, each year somewhere between 500 and 1,000 homes are renovated to a very high standard including a transition to renewables and a phasing out of fossil fuel usage in the buildings. This needs to deepen. We are currently renovating approximately 30,000 homes a year. The national development plan says this figure needs to increase to 45,000.

It is only a shallow retrofit for those 33,000 homes. As such, while perhaps 1,000 homes are hitting the target, that needs to get to 45,000 homes a year between now and 2050. That is the scale of the challenge. It is important the committee understands that is what we have to do. We have to get to every building and spend €30,000 to €50,000 on each. That is huge. While it provides a huge opportunity for health, jobs, the environment, avoiding EU fines and meeting our moral obligations, the committee should know that is the scale of the challenge and one of the key parts of this.

New NZEB building regulations are due to be published in the next couple of weeks. While they are very good from an energy efficiency point of view, they will still allow developers to install fossil-fuel boilers, the removal of which the State will have to fund at a later stage. When we looked at it two or three years ago and the sums were done, it was said that the performance of buildings with gas boilers would be so energy efficient that it would be similar to a heat pump. However, our electricity grid has got more renewable and the 70% target has been accepted widely, including by the Minister and the Joint Committee on Climate Action. That means those numbers will be very different in time. The regulations have taken the last two years to come into force but they will be almost out of date when they do. In 2016, the European Commission published guidance for NZEB for which the definition is a very energy efficient building with a very significant portion of the energy coming from renewables. We have defined that in Ireland as 20%, which is a significant portion. The European Commission's guidance is that it should be 55%. We are missing an opportunity because there is no cost to the State. We should therefore revise urgently the regulations to be published next week. We are going backwards on the number of homes with fossil-fuel boilers. Even with the retrofitting of houses with fossil-fuel boilers, we are being overtaken by new builds. That is one of the points on new build but the major challenge is retrofitting. We have renovated a number of homes for people with severe respiratory illnesses and the State has a similar scheme. We see huge savings and huge health benefits in having done so. We should certainly think about a specific scheme to subsidise heavily people in fuel poverty with solid fuel heated homes, in particular in the midlands and peat burning areas where the environmental emissions from one home could be 20 to 30 tonnes of CO2. That could be reduced to 800 kg or less. That would obviously have a major impact on the energy transition as well as on the environment and job creation in the midlands.

To entice people to renovate non-State-owned and non-low income homes, we must ensure they want to do so and that they get a good renovation and sound, impartial advice. The State must ramp up its involvement in market development significantly. While we provide grants currently, we do not really force the training through the marketplace. In upper Austria, which is a region the size of Munster, CO2 from buildings has been cut by 45% in a decade. That sort of impact is possible. Austria will say the impact comes from a combination of carbon taxes to push people to ask what they need to do to avoid them and grants to subsidise and assist them. The major specific difference between Austria and Ireland is market development. Austria has extensive training courses. If one is a plumber, one must become a plumber who can install renewables. One cannot just choose that. One must be able to do what is required. Homeowners need to be able to afford to renovate and in that regard, Mr. Barry has discussed the potential of green finance. The allocation in the national development plan of €4 billion will support perhaps 6% to 8% of the houses we need to renovate. It is too small and the State is carrying too much of the burden of the deep retrofit programme. We need to have blended finance with grants and advice. There are several models across Europe and at conference after conference, people talk about what the solutions are. We know that the solutions include a blend of very low-cost loans, grants and advice from qualified professionals. The most important thing to move to now is market development with blended finance and grants. Other key points include that the Joint Committee on Climate Action has suggested the establishment of a one stop shop for renovation to provide advice, retrofit design and procurement, which is what the energy agency does. Whether it is that model or another one, one needs to involve a professional in renovation. One cannot simply leave that up to the contractor who turns up at the door. One needs to have someone who is advising the homeowner. It is therefore very important that we build that capacity in Ireland.

I make one comment on planning permission. Within the planning and development regulations, the exemptions for renewables published in 2007 and 2008 are very out of date and are restricting the development of solar PV. One needs to get planning permission to put any solar PV on the roof of a school whereas one does not need planning permission to install a fossil-fuel boiler. One needs planning permission as a homeowner, business owner or industrial unit to go over a very small amount of solar PV, namely 50 sq. m or 7 kW. We need to change that. It could be done at the stroke of a pen by way of a single line in a statutory instrument. While we will be told later today that it is going to be included in the whole-of-Government plan and that it is going to be done, it is a matter of urgency. We have been calling for years for these things to be changed yet it is a small matter of the single stroke of a pen. It is a single line of a statutory instrument. I ask, therefore, that we take some of those costs out of the supply chain and move on.