Oireachtas Joint and Select Committees

Tuesday, 24 May 2022

Joint Oireachtas Committee on Climate Action

Empowering Local Government and Local Communities to Climate Action: Discussion

Ms Gillian Baker:

In terms of the RESS, we do have a community enabling framework of supports, which we just launched in April of this year. This is targeted at a specific niche sector of renewable energy communities that have big ambitions to generate their own projects and participate in the RESS auction. We have seven renewable energy communities in RESS 1. Each of those has a sustainable energy community involved in its project. The results of RESS 2 came out on Friday. A further nine communities were successful in that auction and they are actively developing their own, primarily solar, projects that will be developed over the next while. We have got the community enabling framework, which is a suite of resources that is available to any community that wishes to explore the opportunity of developing its own primarily wind and solar projects. We launched it in April with the first 70 communities. We are currently doing viability assessments on 11 of those. We have got panels of trusted adviser experts in grid and planning.