Dr. David Connolly:

I absolutely share the Deputy's concern and frustration with that. I will tell her something that will astonish her more than anything I have said earlier, which Professor Mathiesen can probably confirm. While all of us here were suffering immensely from incredible price hikes throughout 2022, 90% of district heating customers in Denmark, which is about 1 million people, saw zero increase in their heating costs and some of them saw it reduce. We have to ask how we in Ireland can have 300% and 400% increases in our district heating prices when, throughout the same energy price disaster that took place throughout 2022, 90% of district heating customers in Denmark saw zero increase and some saw a reduction.

In Ireland, we do not really have any district heating. The Danes would call what we have blokvarme, or block communal systems which just heat a building. Any of the heating systems we have which we think of as district heating are effectively just a gas boiler in the basement of an apartment complex heating a building communally whereas what we mean here by district heating is capturing all the waste heat that is being thrown away, putting it in a pipe along the street, removing the gas boiler currently being used in the basement and sticking in the waste heat stream to supply the heat for that building. Hence we get to the situation in Denmark last year, of which we are incredibly envious, that when gas prices went through the roof, the price of the heat being thrown away did not.

I completely hear the Deputy's frustration around the failure of the CRU.

It is probably a much longer-term failure, namely, that we did not connect those communal heating systems to the vast amounts of waste or renewable heat they could have been using but, rather, had them still using gas, in effect. That meant that as gas prices went up twentyfold in 2022, it was rippling through to the bills of the people who were on these communal heating systems. There is good news. We may be able to put patches on it in the short term but the ultimate solution is to get those community heating systems off natural gas and onto these waste heat streams that are present across Dublin city as soon as possible in order that they can have a stable heat price, or at least, given that one cannot predict the energy world, a very high probability of one, into the foreseeable future. They would no longer be dependent on natural gas but, rather, on low-carbon waste heat.