Richard Bruton (Dublin Bay North, Fine Gael)
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I thank the witnesses for the presentations, which were fascinating and go to the heart of many of the challenges we are facing. My first question is to the CRU. At the previous hearings, we heard quite trenchant criticism that the market signals now being provided were not allowing us to develop battery storage, demand management approaches, incentivisation of better use of data centres and the spreading of demand, nor were they incentivising the move to go beyond domestic needs for renewables and start to develop our capacity to promote hydrogen generated from excess renewable facilities. Essentially, people were saying that the CRU is still geared in its pricing regime to the old model that it described of large fossil hubs, and there needs to be a more fundamental shift in the market signals than it is securing through its auctions and capacity system service, and so on. What is the CRU view on that? Are we going to see big shifts?

Allied to that, are domestic auctions sufficient to do this? We have heard from others that, for example, the EU could have an interest in seeing some of these developments. Do we need to have something other than market signals by way of shadow prices? Certainly, in the case of offshore energy, the demand was that there would be a very early capacity auction that ring-fenced floating wind energy and that we should not wait for it to be competitive in a marketplace. I know there are different parts of the auction system and the CRU does not run all of them, but that was the thrust and I would be interested to hear its response to that.

I could not agree more with Mr. McEvilly that we have to take a very sharp look at ourselves in terms of a resilient response to the challenges that now confront us. One question I have is whether we should make circular economy strategies within all our sectors a core part of climate action planning. We are quite detached from the fact that 25% of our food is wasted, 90% of our vehicles are single use, we are exporting 75% of our so-called recycled waste, the construction sector only recycles 10% of its waste and we are not recognising the capacity of timber to be used in buildings to dramatically reduce our dependence on fossil fuels. As part of this, do we need to look much more deeply at how we approach this? It seems there is a bit of an ideological hang-up on whether we have an LNG facility, when the elephant in the room is the fact that a lot of our sectors are deeply entrenched in such a way that we are not really shifting them by current policy.

As an allied point, there was strong criticism of housing in the context of solar energy. It seems that some of the problem with the development of solar has been that it has to be approved under environmental regulations, and that is where the delay is currently occurring, rather than in the Department of Housing, Local Government and Heritage itself. Perhaps I am wrong on that but I understood environmental blockages are holding it back, although I do not know if that is justifiable.