John McGahon (Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

I welcome the Minister of State for coming to the House. I know she has a very busy portfolio and that this is not in her brief. I appreciate her taking the time to answer this Commencement matter. Before I start into the merits of it, I will give the Minister of State the context of it. I am a big advocate of electric vehicles and of the charging infrastructure, and I was amazed a couple of weeks ago when I came across what I found to be a strange anomaly, that is, in Ireland one can only avail of an electric vehicle home charging point if one has a private driveway. That is simple enough because if one has a private driveway, one can take the car in and plug it in. However, that rules out thousands of people in this country, including people who live in apartment blocks, on terraced streets or anybody who does not have a private driveway.

We are at the beginning of this type of technology but we have seriously ambitious targets to have 1 million electric vehicles on our roads by 2030. That is just eight years away, within approximately 20 days' time. What I hope to get from Government is a solution to the problem. What are we planning to do to try to ensure people who live in apartment blocks or terraced houses and who do not have access to private driveways can access charging points?

Some of the new regulations, as the Minister of State will be aware, include regulations under which newly built apartment blocks must have a certain number of electric vehicle charging points, and that is fair enough. That goes perhaps some way in trying to solving the problem in private housing estates. Another thing that can happen is that a management company can decide to put in a couple of charging points, although this can be very difficult because management companies do not want to do it. We want to get to a stage where everyone in this country has an electric vehicle, so it is not going to be feasible for hundreds of charging points to be put into estates. We need something where every home owner can have access. If it is the case that it cannot be physically attached from the home to the car, we need to come up with new forms of technology to get around this.

Talking about new technology, one thing we could look into is what they are doing in Germany at the moment which is interesting. There have been trials where an electric vehicle can connect into an electric light on a street and charge from that light. That means somebody living in a terraced house in Dundalk or anywhere in the country who is not able to block a public pathway or footpath by connecting the car to the house could plug into an ESB pole and take some of the electricity from that for a point in time. It is a new technology in Germany and it is something that could resolve the problem.

The future is bright for electric vehicles. I have no doubt that in the next couple of years we are going to see a reduction in the cost of electric vehicles and an increase in the range of electric vehicles and the distances they can go. When the ranges in electric vehicles increase it will reduce the need for chargers at the same time. The reason I brought forward this Commencement matter today is that we are excluding many thousands of people in this country from the use of an electric vehicle and from having a home charging point by their lack of a private driveway. I hope the Government can offer some solutions on what its plans are and how we hope to resolve this anomaly at some stage in the future.