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

I want to make the point that it was a very successful year, partly because it was very windy and because solar is now coming onstream. This is only the first year it is coming onstream. Approximately 100 households are having solar panels put on their roofs each day. We are putting them on every school. We have 600 MW of solar in fields and 400 MW on rooftops. This is not stopping; if anything, it is accelerating. It will increase. We have a further 2 GW of solar in the field which has already been through the auction process. This number will jump. We are going towards 80% renewables by the end of this decade. The big question is how we tap into ocean energy and turn it into an industrial opportunity. I will have to be upfront and honest and say that I am a great supporter of wave and tidal energy. They are probably more medium and longer term. The immediate opportunity is in offshore wind and there again we had a very successful auction system last year with 3 GW of offshore wind. We are going to go further south and west as we develop this resource.

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