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As we all know, Ireland is currently paying the price for the inability of its political and corporate leaders to take seriously the warning signs of an economy where property investment and borrowing generally got out of control. Looking at policy and commercial investment plans for energy supply and distribution, Richard Douthwaite asks, are the decision makers showing an alarmingly similar attitude to evident gas supply threats?
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Earlier this year constructireland.ie broke the news of the
introduction of the pilot Home Energy Saving Scheme, a new grant
funding programme designed to stimulate the en masse refurbishment of
Ireland’s poorly performing existing housing stock. John Hearne travelled to one of the pilot areas to see how the scheme is working on the ground, and discover how the scheme is developing.
One of the most striking characteristics of the Home Energy Saving Scheme (HES) pilot projects is the speed with which they’ve been rolled out. The three regional initiatives were announced in April, and the cluster version barely a month ago. Yet the plan is to have all works complete and all results fully collated by the end of November.
In the kitchen of her farmhouse in Lorrha, North Tipperary, Margaret Murray, who applied under the North Tipperary pilot, says she assumed the date on the form was a misprint. “I thought they must mean November ‘09, not ‘08.” Paul Kenny of the Tipperary Energy Agency, the technical partner to North Tipperary County Council, who are running the scheme in this neck of the woods, explains that the stakeholders need to know what kind of value they’re getting for the e5 million earmarked for the regional pilots, before they parcel out the remaining e95 million committed for national roll-out under the Programme for Government. For the householder, that means getting the works sorted quickly. But behind the scenes, the effort required to get the administrative backbone to support the scheme in place ahead of this year’s budget has been huge. “SEI were instructed to roll out the scheme and do it as quickly as possible.” Paul Kenny explains. “They didn’t have a lot of time to mull it over and think about it. They were told go start up a scheme that has a huge administrative burden”.
The Home Energy Saving Scheme is designed to target older housing – nothing built later than 2002; the logic being that these are the buildings most in need of energy makeovers. 1,500 homes across North Tipperary, Limerick, Clare and Dundalk form the regional core of the pilot, while the additional strand (covering 500 houses) will allow for ‘clusters’ of housing spread throughout the country.
An SEI home energy assessor – as distinct from a BER assessor, given that assessments will not include official BERs during the piloting phase – comes to your house, rates it and advises on works that need to be carried out to improve energy efficiency. The householder pays e100 towards the cost of the assessment (the full price is usually around e300-e500) and SEI covers the rest. Thereafter, 30 per cent of the works recommended by the assessor are paid for by government, to a maximum of e2,500. Launching the scheme, Minister Ryan said, “Of the 1.7 million homes in Ireland, it is estimated that up to 1 million require some investment to improve their energy efficiency. This scheme will support homeowners who wish to invest in their homes to bring them up to modern energy efficiency standards. Such investment has been shown to pay for itself in energy savings in a few short years. This scheme will help Ireland meet our climate change targets at the same time as assisting the householder with energy costs. Householders will save on their electricity and heating bills; they will use their energy more wisely and increase the re-sale value on their homes. The scheme will also be welcome news for the house-building sector.”
SEI estimates that householders will save up to e500 in their energy bills every year and that the scheme will save 6,000 tonnes of CO2 in its first year alone. The full e100 million scheme is expected to yield greenhouse gas savings of 175,000 tonnes per year.
In Lorrha, County Tipperary, Margaret and Francis Murray say they
applied because they wanted to see how efficient the house was. Their
heating load is borne primarily by oil, but heavily supplemented by
turf, which they harvest themselves on their own section of bog. “We
put down a good fire.” says Francis, but adds that with the prohibition
on turf harvesting imminent, not to mention the escalating price of
oil, energy efficiency has become increasingly important to them. “We
do burn a lot of turf – more than seven or eight tonnes a year. If we
were to buy it, it would cost us a fortune.”
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