Eamon Ryan (Dublin South, Green Party)

I do not believe that in the immediate future there will be parity between support measures for offshore and onshore for the simple reason that the environment and the capital costs of offshore are in excess of anything on onshore. It is still an evolving technology and is not yet on a commercial scale. I made a strategic decision that it was right for us as a country to seek to develop our offshore potential. If we were not, at this stage, giving a signal that we wanted to get into that business we would see investment concentrating in Germany, England, France, Portugal and elsewhere where they have given similar support prices to the one we have outlined as our support price. Failure to give a price in that range would have meant that investment would have gone to other countries. I still think, even with that support price, there is no guarantee of the transfer of capital resources and other engineering expertise into the offshore area because it is expensive and there are certain constraints in terms of shipping and grid access that make it difficult to develop the offshore.

In the future, we will develop our onshore potential first — something of the order of 4,000 MW was set out in our all island grid study as our onshore capability between now and 2020. We will then develop our offshore in tandem. It is probably an additional 2,000 MW first. The advantage of offshore, if we crack it and if we get the economies of scale down, is that it can be scaled up to a very large scale and the wind is more consistent.

The onshore business has also experienced difficulties, largely because of turbine availability, increasing turbine costs and operational and maintenance costs. We have reviewed and kept in mind our support price system. I outlined a series of changes in that regard at the recent Irish wind energy conference, including changes we would allow, such as contestable construction of the grid connection which is a major benefit for smaller developers. We retrospectively increased the price to take into account an earlier year's inflation increase. We have been working to determine a market price floor that gives some certainty to financers in the area. We are working to fine tune our support price system which is necessary because of the new single electricity market in which we operate. I believe we are getting that right. We are starting to see investment in onshore wind on the scale needed but that is only the start. We will then move on to offshore and a number of other sources.

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