Ms Susanne Rogers:

As the Deputy said, district heating does not come up that much. From what I have read and seen mentioned about this topic, though, I have gathered that people are locked into this system because it tends to be used in landlords with multiple properties. When we spoke about landlords previously, the majority of them owned one property. These heating systems, however, tend to be found in massive apartment blocks and people are locked into higher rates for heating charges. I have not seen any suggested policy solutions to this issue yet, but I will definitely make a note of this issue and I will send on any information I find.

We need to be careful even with the conversation about heat pumps. I have been speaking to a couple of people recently who said a heat pump will operate differently in Donegal than in Cork. Much of it is about the temperature of the air that is taken in. We need to be careful about conversations that we have in that the heat pump is not the answer to everybody, everywhere all of the time. We need to be careful. It needs to be properly set up for the place it is in. There was research done that looked at four separate areas – I think Leinster, the west coast, Donegal and Cork. There were 100% differences in the efficiency of the heat pump depending on where in the country it was being used. Things such as district heating and heat pumping are still quite intricate. We still need to look at them on a case-by-case basis, which is the worst answer anybody can give to anything. It depends. We need to be careful when we are installing things such as heat pumps into low-income households because sometimes the bills can actually go up. We need to be careful of that.