Peter Fitzpatrick (Louth, Independent) | Oireachtas source

As we appear to be exiting the Covid pandemic, our next challenge as a society is the rising cost of living. Everyone is aware that the cost of day-to-day living is now rising at an unprecedented level. Whether it is the cost of our grocery shops, the cost of light and heat in our homes or our transport costs, everything is on its way up. From my experience, and from dealing with my constituents in Louth, the dramatic rise in heating and energy costs is most alarming. Many of those I have spoken to have experienced massive increases in their heating bills since last year; in some cases they have doubled. This is unsustainable and will lead to fuel poverty if nothing is done about it. I welcome the recent announcement by the Government on support for homeowners to improve the energy efficiency of their homes, although I fear the devil could be in the detail when homeowners begin to access the scheme.

Before we speak about the Government support scheme, it is important we discuss why there has been such a dramatic increase in the cost of heating a home. The Government, along with its colleagues in the EU, must address the reasons energy costs have increased so dramatically and seem set to continue to rise. There is no doubt but that we have to address the issue of home energy efficiency, but we also have to address the root cause of costs rising so quickly. This affects not just heating costs but also all businesses, which now face unprecedented energy cost increases, which, unfortunately, will have to be passed on to the end consumer. That is the same consumer we are trying to help with energy supports. What would happen if a consumer were to invest in the energy upgrade but his or her other bills, such as grocery or transport bills, continued to increase and eventually wiped out the gains made? Furthermore, the cost of building materials has increased dramatically in the past 12 months, and the question must be asked, are all these increases justified? The cost of insulation and timber, in particular, has increased dramatically. Is this big rise in costs justified? As I said, we have to address the root cause of these increases.

Getting back to the recent Government announcement, I welcome any initiative that will help a homeowner to improve the energy efficiency of his or her home. It is important that a person's home is comfortable and easy to heat. The last thing we want is for someone to be afraid to turn on the heating because of its cost. We have to eliminate fuel poverty. The Government announcement stated that the Government intends to have 500,000 homes upgraded to a BER rating of B2 by 2030. The announcement stated that measures included a new national home energy upgrade scheme, providing increased grant levels of up to 50% of the cost of a typical deep retrofit to a BER B2 standard. I welcome this but I have some serious concerns about it.

The main thrust of the scheme seems to be encouraging homeowners to invest in heat pump technology. While I welcome that, we need to discuss how practical that will be. Heat pumps use electricity as their fuel. The first question I have is on how we will generate the electricity to satisfy the massive increase in demand from heat pumps. It is no secret that we are running very close to full capacity in respect of electricity generation at present. What will happen when the demand on the grid suddenly increases because of all these additional heat pumps on the system? Has anybody done a study on that to see how the grid will cope with that? This applies to electric vehicles as well. How will the grid cope with an additional 1 million electric vehicles on the road by 2030? The other question we must address is on how we will generate our electricity. What would happen if all these homes were to use increasing amounts of electricity in a more-than-efficient manner yet electricity continued to be generated in a manner that is bad for the environment and not cost-effective?

The other thing we must consider are the skilled tradesmen who will be required to carry out these works.

At present, it is almost impossible to get tradesmen to do work as they are all so busy. Where will the new tradesmen come from? We are targeting 500,000 homes to be upgraded by 2030. By my calculations, they will have to upgrade an average of 1,300 homes every week from later this year until 2030 to meet the targets. I fear this is unachievable unless we have the skilled workforce to carry out the work. I would like to hear the Government's response on this. For these schemes to work, we need to see real and verifiable results. We do not want a box-ticking exercise leading to no improvement in homes.

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