Richard Boyd Barrett (Dún Laoghaire, People Before Profit Alliance)
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866. To ask the Minister for Communications, Energy and Natural Resources the cost of rolling out a fully financed retrofitting programme to bring houses to passive standard of energy efficiency with plans for 10,000 units in 2017. [27505/16]

Denis Naughten (Roscommon-Galway, Independent)
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The passive house standard is a voluntary standard developed by the private sector for new dwellings. Directive 2010/31/EU on the energy performance of buildings requires EU Member States to ensure that all new buildings (including dwellings) will be nearly zero-energy buildings by 31 December 2020. Ireland’s current energy performance standard for dwellings under Building Regulations (Part L Amendment) 2011 is recognised by the Global Building Performance Network as being among the leading statutory standards in the world. The retrofit of existing dwellings to these new build standards is challenging both technically and economically.

There are very few examples of large scale passive house retrofit projects internationally therefore it is difficult to place a precise estimate on the likely cost of upgrading 10,000 homes in Ireland. In the Netherlands, one such programme, Energiesprong, has the aim of upgrading 111,000 housing association homes to a carbon neutral standard. To date, I understand that over 1,000 homes have been upgraded under this programme and the average cost per home is in the region of €70-€80,000.

It should be noted that the Energiesprong programme applies to a relatively homogenous housing stock of housing association-owned, terraced properties and so the costs associated with upgrading larger and more diverse houses in Ireland is likely to be considerably higher. In addition, as noted above the Energiesprong only aims at carbon neutrality, a full passive house upgrade would require even more investment.  It would not be unreasonable to estimate an average cost well in excess of €100,000 per home, suggesting a minimum investment requirement of €1 billion to upgrade 10,000 Irish homes to passive house standards.

As the Energy White Paper notes, the average cost of upgrading a typical dwelling in Ireland to a more modest B on the Building Energy  Rating is €20,000. Our experience to date with pilots, suggests that improving the Building Energy Rating of an existing home to a higher A3 standard, with energy bills savings of 50% for the householder, can be achieved with a total investment of between €25-€30k.

It is clear that to deliver this investment and gain the significant reductions in the energy usage of our existing building stock, public funding will need to be leveraged with private investment by homeowners. My Department continues to explore options to incentivise and encourage deep retrofit models and are supporting demonstration projects, pilots and research in this area.