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

The SEAI is an agency of our Department and it is best placed. It runs the sustainable energy community scheme. We had a very good meeting yesterday, as I said, and that immediate connection between the community developers and the SEAI is important. It has presented a lot of practical and easy-to-digest information. That to my mind is a key part of how we make this work.

The new renewable scheme will be available within the coming weeks, in a short number of weeks, and it will be significant because it will provide a guaranteed price and not force community groups or others to go through a complex auction process that is intimidating and can be very hard to negotiate if you are not fully versed in the issues and do not have experience of, or a background in, developing projects. It is up to 5 MW in scale and my expectation is it will be particularly strong for solar solutions because, in truth, a lot of the smaller scale wind projects are not as economic as the larger projects. The nature of wind power has changed and scale matters in lowering costs. That is less the case for solar power.

To return to a debate we had on an earlier question, it is going to be critical for us to be able to integrate, manage and balance the system we have to make efficient use of the existing grid system. Listening to the representatives of the ESB recently, the company is showing new-----

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