Professor John FitzGerald:

In our reports we have made the point that getting the price right is only the beginning. In order to help people change one needs to have a major range of other policies. The State has a major role in this regard. We are interested in possibly focusing first on local authority dwellings, where the State has the role. How can one drive the development of capacity? If one does it, there are multiple benefits.

There is an issue with infrastructure. Somebody came to see me this morning from County Louth. He drove from Dundalk to Dublin and the charger at the two service stations on the way down were broken. He just got to Dublin and found somewhere to charge his car. It is the responsibility of the State and the regulatory authorities to ensure the roll-out of the infrastructure.

The infrastructure must be rolled out in advance. I am not going to buy an electric car unless I know I can get to Kilcrohane, which is as far as one can drive in Ireland, and charge my car. Kilcrohane is even further away than Donegal. The State has the responsibility to make it possible by putting in place the infrastructure. Of course, one has to get the price right but that is only the beginning. We need research. In terms of retrofitting dwellings, we need to know what will work for people.

Another area which is important is getting the incentives right for the State itself. One of my colleagues in the ESRI, Ms Sue Scott did an interesting study in 2003, looking at energy efficiency in the third level and university sectors. Universities had done a reasonable job because they had built a combined heat and power plant because they knew they could get the money back over five years. The institutes of technology were useless - not because they were useless - but because the Department stated that unless one could get the money back within one year, one cannot do it. That was the level of control. The headmaster - who died unfortunately in the past six months - of the school that my children went to 20 years ago, knew I was interested in this and sent me the electricity bills for the school and he showed he had managed to halve the bills but the point for him was that he managed to hide the money from the Department of Education. As he was a woodwork teacher, he used the money to make furniture for the school, which he could not afford to buy.