Alex White (Dublin South, Labour) | Oireachtas source

I appreciate what the Deputy said about the domestic sector. We have large industrial users in place in the country. We might not like many of these big operations and companies and so on but there is no point in us believing that we should not bring them into the picture and ensure that we incentivise them. I understood that was the point the Deputy was making with respect to a cut at the larger users and I apologise if that is not what he meant. He is right about the domestic sector in that we need to incentivise it.

The analysis we carried out suggested that it would not be cost effective at this stage to include the domestic heating sector in the RHI scheme. This is due to a number of factors, including the much higher support tariff per kilowatt hour of energy that would be required to incentivise households to change heating systems as well as the significantly greater cost associated with administering the scheme for a large number of households in what is an unregulated sector compared to the approximately 3,000 or so commercial and industrial installations envisaged for the scheme. However, there is much we can do in the domestic sector. Electricity has a role to play. Traditionally, we have shunned the idea of electric heat, for reasons that we all understand, in that we regard it as expensive and so on. There are many outstanding new developments happening in the sector where we can see that electricity can, in many ways, be the answer, or one of the answers, in the domestic environment.

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