Trevor Sargent (Dublin North, Green Party)

There are factors that have a bearing on the uptake and one, as Deputy Sherlock stated, is its economic viability. The recession has had many knock-on effects, one of which is the reduction in the price of oil. The viability of planting and processing a crop and getting a return for the labour means that naturally it will be difficult to compete with a product which has been lying in the ground collecting solar energy over millions of years and just needs to be pumped out and refined to be ready for use. The economic issues will change as oil becomes more expensive and the phase we are in at present is that we need to put the infrastructure in place, even though it is more costly at present, so that when oil becomes unaffordable we will have an infrastructure that can be expanded and the skills to do so.

We are in a difficult period because we have to fund this transition and getting money to fund such a transition is difficult in a recession. We are not at the ideal by a long shot; we need to appraise the viability in the current economic circumstances and consider how this fuel will be used. There have been experiments on turning miscanthus into briquettes to try to compete with the wood-chip element in the renewable bioenergy sector and apparently they have been reasonably successful - I have not seen the details. This is the level of trial taking place at present and it is part of the bioenergy action plan which aims to increase the use of bioenergy in the heat, CHP and transport markets to 2020. We work with the Department of Communications, Energy and Natural Resources in this regard.

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