Ulick Burke (Galway East, Fine Gael)
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Question 134: To ask the Tánaiste and Minister for Education and Skills if she will consider grant aid to schools for the provision of rain water harvesting and the provision of an appropriate wind turbine to supply power to large schools; and if she will make a statement on the matter. [41496/10]

Mary Coughlan (Donegal South West, Fianna Fail)
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Rainwater harvesting systems were first introduced for major school building projects in 2008. Since then all major school building projects, where site conditions and circumstances allow and where economically viable to do so, can incorporate a rainwater harvesting system into their brief. While fitting the systems in new schools during construction is relatively straightforward, retrofitting them in existing schools is much more difficult and expensive because of the various dedicated pipe work systems both within the building and externally underground and the amount of making good work that is required in each instance.

For existing buildings it is more cost effective to minimise the demand for water firstly through installing measures to reduce water usage such as push type spray taps, low flushing toilets, urinal controls, repairing leaks etc. To this end, as part of the Summer Works Scheme 2010, schools were invited to apply for Water Conservation measures and I recently announced a list of schools whose applications under this scheme were successful. This list is also available on my Department's website, www.education.ie.

The application of wind energy schemes in schools has been explored by my Department and the results indicate that given the scale of application to match demand and capacity in a meaningful way, schools are better to connect to one of the main wind energy electrical suppliers to maximise the potential of green electricity. It must be remembered that a sustainable solution involves the matching of a sustainable resource with the end users' needs and not just the application of the resource. The situation with regard to wind energy is kept under review given improvements in technology and in the market place.