Peter Burke (Longford-Westmeath, Fine Gael)
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As Minister for Enterprise, Trade and Employment, and alongside the Minister for the Environment, Climate and Communications, I am firmly committed to reducing emissions from the heating of commercial buildings by 20% by 2025 and 45% by 2030. The Energy Performance of Buildings Directive will also set minimum standards for energy efficiency in our non-residential buildings.

The most recently available EPA emissions inventory data for commercial buildings relates to 2022, and in that year there were 766 kilo-tonnes of C02 equivalent produced. In the baseline year for the sectoral emissions ceilings this emissions cohort produced 874 kilo-tonnes of C02 equivalent. We've therefore achieved around 12.3% reduction in emissions from commercial buildings, as of 2022. This is a good start, but I am very conscious that we will need to accelerate our efforts to support businesses to invest in their economic and environmental sustainability.

These targets now require significantly reducing the fossil fuels we use to heat the space and water used in our commercial premises including offices, hotels, restaurants, retail, and other places of work. It requires us to retrofit inefficient buildings, remove natural gas, heating oil or other fossil fuels when and where economically feasible, and to change our behaviour to use the energy we need as efficiently as possible.

Many businesses have already made progress on this journey, and the Climate Toolkit for Business is a really useful online resource for those who are just getting started - with over 10,000 plans created to date.

The Government is providing significant financial supports for businesses to take these measures. Thousands of businesses are being supported through the Green Transition Fund, SEAI energy programmes, SkillNet Ireland training, the LEO Green for Business programme, and a range of other advisory, training and grant aid offerings. We are constantly looking for ways to better equip enterprises for this transition, and to increase the uptake of available supports - for example, we amended SEAI's Solar PV grants for businesses last summer to make them more accessible and attractive, and seen a substantial increase in demand for that scheme following this amendment.

Under the Heat and Built Environment Taskforce, my officials are also preparing a Decarbonisation Roadmap for our commercial built environment, that will set out the key additional policy interventions required to achieve the objectives set out for emissions reduction from our commercial building stock. The Roadmap will include reference to the standards, regulations and implementation timelines that will help drive the necessary changes in heating systems, minimum equipment efficiencies and smart operational and monitoring strategies and technologies required to meet the targets. The Roadmap will further assess the opportunities to address the 'spit incentive' where a building is leased, including through the use of green lease clauses. I expect that this Roadmap can be published in the coming months.