Mr. Seamus Hoyne:

I defer to my colleague's expertise on traditional buildings. From a fabric first approach, one must understand how the building operates, particularly in the case of traditional buildings. I refer to one of my earlier comments. Sometimes, with traditional buildings, we need to consider that we can leave a large portion of the building alone and still achieve carbon reductions by potentially connecting to district heating systems, low temperature heating systems or other systems. We need to think about these buildings in different ways and focus on carbon reduction rather than just kilowatt hours of energy.

I am delighted that the Deputy asked about data. This is a bugbear of mine. As a principal investigator and researcher, when I speak with colleagues across Europe, they have a wealth of data on the actual energy performance of buildings, which we are only starting to develop now. Our building energy rating database is one of the best in Europe and the envy of many other countries. Many researchers using that database understand the profile of buildings and the energy performance after a retrofit, but the building energy rating is an asset rating and does not tell us the actual energy consumption.

There are lots of research projects, both ongoing and completed, which have gathered operational data from residential and non-residential buildings, but, typically and traditionally, that building sits in that research project and the information may not be shared or collated. Part of my message is that, as researchers and project developers, we need to figure out how we can collate this data. I am not sure yet what is the best mechanism, but we need additional data to that available in the BER data. We are continuing to gather data on those 20 buildings I mentioned earlier. We will have five years of minute-by-minute energy data on the heat pumps operating in those retrofits. One of those homes is mine, so I am the energy geek looking at my own data to understand what is going on. The process of sharing the data can become complicated because of data protection and research agreements, but we really need to crack that because by sharing the data we can then develop quicker solutions and new innovations.

In the future, our homes are going to very much have interconnected systems. My home is a guinea pig. I have seven different pieces of equipment being tested in my home: one is looking at air quality and one is looking at PV, but they are all different systems that do not talk to each other. We have a lot of work to do to get smarter in how we use data. That is an opportunity for our IT experts, of whom we have hundreds and thousands in this country.