Eamon Ryan (Dublin Bay South, Green Party)
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It went through the Cabinet yesterday and it will go to the Oireachtas next. Once it is approved there, it will be operational. I believe our Department did a really good job. There must have been 25 officials working full time on this for the past year. It was really extensive. We had something like 70 public consultation engagements. I was in Kilmore Quay earlier this summer meeting some of the local fishermen. Our fisheries liaison officer and others were there. It is a hugely important economic project for the State. It is much better to be on a plan-led approach. You can take things into account before you start, rather than some developers going out and claiming one bit of the sea as theirs by sticking a little badge on it, as happened in the Klondike, and stating that it is their part of the Irish ocean when it is not. It belongs to the Irish people and we manage it in a plan-led way. We avoid the more sensitive fishing grounds, breeding grounds, shipping lanes and cable routes. This de-risks projects. I am very confident that we will see that auction system work early next year when it kicks in.

What do we do next? First, we have to get the phase 1 projects through planning and then built. We have to do the auction for phase 2. We have to go to the next stage. Depending on how the phase 1 projects go, that will involve looking back at the east coast but will also involve going west and south.

The next focus should and will be on designating experimental areas, particularly for the development of floating offshore wind. This is critical for the west because water depths there mean that fixed-bottom generation will not be a viable economic option. Actually, it could be in some areas, for example, certain places in the north west, but if the Cathaoirleach went 5 km west of the Cliffs of Moher in his county, he would see depths of 100 m. If he went 20 km out, the waters would be even deeper. As such, the west has potential for floating offshore.

Interestingly, the UK had a floating auction result last week for a 400 MW experimental project. Its price was still a multiple of ours, so it is not commercial yet. We should consider designating areas for 200 MW generation. It would not need to be a large designation, only a site, as what we need to develop now is a single experimental project. Examining certain sites would be interesting. For example, we should and will consider southern waters, where we might be dealing with sites of 12 m to 14 m wave heights and wind speeds of up to 10.5 m/s. Those characteristics are different than those on the west coast, where the waters are not only deeper, but there are wave heights of up to 18 m and wind speeds are higher. The latter are of potential benefit. If they got up to 11 m/s or 12 m/s, the power output from that every evening would be a multiple. The growth in power output is not linear. This should be our next step. The Cabinet held a competitiveness meeting the week before last and we agreed that our offshore task force on renewables would set up a specific working group to advance test sites for floating offshore.