Dr. David Connolly:

It might be useful to send a position paper on this after the meeting but our proposal, which is just a proposal, is that anybody who wanted to develop a district heating network in Ireland would have to pass a fit-and-proper-person test, which is a similar structure to what we have in the offshore wind or waste sectors. Our proposal is that if such a threshold were passed, we could on the back of that build some requirements for a local authority where an entity that approached it about a project were deemed a fit-and-proper person as a developer. The local authority could be obliged to provide information such as that relating to the existing utilities on the road, the routes where projects may be being developed and the kinds of heat loads that local authority or other public sector buildings might have. There could be something like that, where a certain threshold that would have to be passed would kick in some requirements.

At the other end of the spectrum, if we step back from local authority and speak about the public sector at large, in any of the works I have seen, the existence of a district heating network in a city hinges absolutely on whether public sector buildings decide to connect to it.

For example, if individual public sector buildings in a city all decided to install an individual heat pump, that would be the end of a district heating system for that city because of what Professor Mathiesen referred to earlier. Those anchor loads that underpin that spine of the network are the public sector buildings in the vast majority of cases. I know we started with a niche discussion about local authorities and help could be provided there but from the wider public sector perspective, they will certainly underpin these networks in many cases.