Richard Bruton (Dublin Bay North, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

I thank the Deputy for his kind comments, which are not common in this House.

I see huge potential in this area. As the Deputy probably knows, we have pencilled in offshore wind for 3.5 GW in the period up to 2030 and hope that we will exceed that. That is our ambition and we are consulting on what sort of a grid network would be appropriate to try and do that in a quick way. Should it be done by the State, creating a platform, or should it be done by individual connectors? That is something that would certainly accelerate this process.

The Deputy is right that the focus at the moment is on the east coast but the west coast has enormous potential. When one tots up the amount of sea space in this country, it is ten times the size of our land space, and the west coast has considerable potential in that respect.

The Deputy is also right that we will need floating technology. That is in demonstration stage at the moment and is not yet at a stage of commercial exploitation. Its cost levels are currently much higher than its competitors but the Deputy is also right that the direction of travel is that this will open up a significant opportunity.

The last assessment of the west coast suggested that it could have between 23 GW and 27 GW of potential. That would go way beyond supplying Ireland's needs and we would need to see how we could integrate that into a European network or, as the Deputy said, develop hydrogen.

The EU has indicated, in the context of the European Green Deal, that this is an area in which it wants to invest research funding in order to accelerate the capacity to have a hydrogen industry that will use excess renewable energy when it is available. I refer, for example, to circumstances where the wind is blowing but the energy produced not needed for the grid. There is real potential here. Development will be further down the line, but the benefit of the auction approach we take is that, as the technology starts to come on stream, we could have pilot pots for elements within the overall auction to give emerging technologies an opportunity to prove themselves. We would be open to that.

On the just transition, the reality is that we are only starting on an accelerated pace of decarbonisation. The midlands has certainly been the most severely hit because of the fact that peat is a solid fuel and the way in which matters have progressed much quicker than had been planned.

I agree that just transition has to be looked at in a much broader context. The National Economic and Social Council, NESC, has been given the role of overseeing the way in which we implement just transition. The first experience, through Kieran Mulvey's work, shows the potential of bottom-up participation and we have to imbed that into any other approach that we take. No doubt there are other sectors and regions where we will have to develop this and I am sure, as we become familiar with the process of just transition, people will see a more permanent structure being put in place that can deal with the challenges which emerge in different sectors. Deputies will understand why we needed to get an effective response in the midlands to something that came much more suddenly than anyone expected, and that is why we took the approach outlined. The lessons from Mr. Mulvey's work will inform the future direction of the just transition strategy.

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