Mr. Paul Kenny:

The Deputy asked who the other energy agencies are. There are three independent agencies. There is Codema, the City of Dublin Energy Management Agency, but it only really provides services for the local authority. The scale of Dublin's local authorities is such that they need a professional service almost entirely for themselves. To replicate a model like the Tipperary Energy Agency in Dublin would take a large unit. The third one is 3CEA, the Three Counties Energy Agency, which covers counties Carlow, Kilkenny and Wexford. The model it uses is similar to ours and the two senior staff in 3CEA previously worked with us in Tipperary. They do great work.

ESB does not have a pay-as-you-save product. Part of the idea of a blend of loan finance and grants is that loan repayments would more or less match the savings. However, they will not always do so and we need to be frank. We have very low fossil fuel costs and high energy costs are unlikely to arise until a carbon tax is introduced. As such, a pay-as-you-save scheme will not work effectively. The green deal in the UK failed spectacularly, partly because matching savings with repayments was one of the rules. It is very hard to do that when fossil fuel prices are low and rather than taxing fossil fuels, much of the cost of providing them is subsidised.

The Deputy mentioned electric heating at the time of the oil crisis. I will share an anecdote. We renovated three private houses in what was once a social housing estate. In the previous year, the three households combined had spent €7,100 on heat using a mixture of oil, solid fuel, liquefied petroleum gas, LPG, and storage heaters. There were three very different heating systems in the houses that had changed over time. The three houses will be heated for less than €1,000 this year following the deep retrofit scheme funded by the Sustainable Energy Authority of Ireland, SEAI. It was not a cheap renovation but the three houses have no mould where once they had loads of mould and the residents had health issues. They are now warm, dry and cheap to heat. The cost of heating those houses is much less than the fuel allowance so it is essentially free. That is how we will remove carbon emissions and fuel poverty - through insulation and heat pumps, not through subsidies.