Eamon Ryan (Dublin Bay South, Green Party) | Oireachtas source

This week, we will start to see the consents being provided for the first phase of offshore projects. Next spring, subject to them going through an auction process that we are establishing now, they will go into the planning system. The planning constraint is the biggest. We have to expand An Bord Pleanála dramatically and speed up our whole planning process because it is killing us at present, in housing and environment in a range of different ways. I believe we can and will do that.

All this will happen in the lifetime of this Government. We will start to see the second phase of projects in the south east and further in the east and then also into Cork, as well as Shannon.

It will be south and west. We will take into account the best environmental analysis. We must get the environmental planning of this right for it to work. It is the biggest risk and the biggest constraint. In the lifetime of this Government we will set the country on this course towards delivering what we call the enduring regime, which is the really large scale of power that particularly exists to the west and north west. We will design ways in which we can catch, store, share and ship that energy. We are right in the middle of doing that and it will be delivered. It is not just offshore. The scale of the challenge to meet the targets means we must deliver as much solar energy in the next three years as the amount of renewable power we rolled out in the last 20. I know that sounds impossible but it is what we have to do. It will involve every school building, tens of thousands of houses and the involvement of farmers. It will be backed up by batteries, pump storage and a whole range of other balancing capabilities and our business community will have a central role in being part of this new balancing energy system. We are not the only ones doing it. The Americans are going at it at speed. The Chinese are doing more than the rest of the world combined. All our colleagues in Europe are doing it. We are in a race to deliver this and we will and in our Department, in the agencies, in the companies and in the Irish people, we have the capability to do this.

In agriculture it is the same scale of change. It is diversification into agroforestry and new mechanisms of riparian forestry. Deputy McNamara is not here now but he mentioned anaerobic digestion earlier and we absolutely need to deliver that too.

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