Mr. Rory Somers:

Regarding the RESS and the community pot, the long-term aim of RESS is to deliver a large amount of large-scale renewable generation and to follow EU policy by being delivered at the lowest cost. That is typically done in a competitive commercial environment. In granting approval for the community pot, the European Commission limited the scope of the state aid for the community ring-fenced pot to 1% over the course of the RESS approval. I stress that the RESS approval was up to 2025. For the RESS to progress beyond that, a further assessment would be required. The state aid approval that follows subsequent auctions within the period after that could have different rules under revised state aid approval.

As I said earlier, the CEEAG eclipsed the original RESS state-aid approach on the basis that those community projects of between 0.5 MW and 5 MW that are allowed for within RESS today had to be in a competitive environment when RESS was approved. They no longer need to be. That is where it is possible for them to be taken out of the competitive environment and it is then up to the Department to decide what support arrangements are appropriate. I mentioned that the small-scale generation scheme, which would be a different mechanism and a guaranteed feed-in tariff, is one possible way of filling that gap.

If we look at the continuum of what we are trying to do from a policy perspective, it is important to recognise that as was mentioned earlier we started with one project in one location which took ten years to come to fruition and very much community led fully delivered by the local community efforts and funding. We really need to move forward bringing communities through the phases of development.

RESS has provided the first opportunity for that. We anticipate that those successful RESS 1 projects as entities could continue to produce second and third projects in subsequent auctions. When they become scaled community entities in their own right, they no longer need to be ring-fenced. They become experienced and ought to become efficient and competitive in their own right and no longer need the benefit of a ring-fenced community pot. That is a long-term aim. It will take a number of years to achieve. That assumes they are fairly large projects. We have another route. Microgeneration is the local community self-consumption model. Small-scale generation is the bit in between which marries the ability for small-scale generators to do it primarily for self-consumption but also creates an avenue for them to participate without getting into a competitive environment.