We will upgrade 500,000 homes with new insulation scheme by 2030, says Minister Eamon Ryan
THE Government announced the biggest home insulation scheme ever offered in the State this week.
Ministers signed off on proposals for the new Home Energy Upgrade Scheme.
The scheme aims to allow people to make their homes warmer, cut heating bills and reduce carbon emissions. It is one of the centrepieces of the Government’s Climate Action Plan and there is a target of retrofitting 500,000 homes to BER B2 standard by 2030 and installing 400,000 heat pumps.
Under the new scheme, grants of more than €25,000 will be offered to individual homeowners to help pay for the retrofits to make their homes warmer and more energy efficient.
On top of that, the Government also this week revealed that households will save €200 on electricity under a new cost-of-living plan to tackle runaway inflation.
Writing in the Irish Sun on Sunday today, Environment Minister Eamon Ryan says the retrofitting plan is a “no-brainer” that will help the tackle the crisis and at the same time, create thousands of jobs across the country.
HOME IMPROVEMENTS NEEDED
By Minister Eamon Ryan
In the 1970’s and 80’s a wave of home improvements brought central heating to many homes.
We replaced open fires burning coal and peat with oil or gas boilers.
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Now almost all homes have central heating and the improvement to our quality of life has been great.
But, we need to do that again.
We need to make our homes more energy efficient so we can improve people’s health, slash heating bills, and cut energy use.
Up until now, for most people, getting major insulation work done on your home has been too expensive and complicated.
This week we changed that. We are making insulating your home as easy as buying a car and we are cutting the costs for the homeowner too.
CASH SUPPORTS
I was delighted to announce a significant increase in supports for retrofitting to make the process easier and more affordable.
Grants are now going to be available for up to 50 per cent of the cost of a deep retrofit. This means up to €25,000 for a typical home to get it up to a BER of B2.
There will also be special grants for attic and cavity block insulation of up to 80 per cent. Work that previously cost a few grand, will now cost a few hundred euro.
For those who can’t afford to avail of grants, the Government will retrofit social and private homes to the full cost. My department will be committing close to €200m for those schemes this year alone.
The amount of money the government is putting into this means many jobs will be created.
HOUSING STOCK INCREASE
There are young people learning their trade today who will spend the rest of their careers on retrofitting.
Between now and 2030 the government will be putting €8bn into upgrading homes. The target is to get half a million homes done by the end of the decade.
And the work won’t stop in 2030, we will need to continue upgrading our housing stock right up to 2050 as we work to meet our climate targets.
A real benefit of this retrofitting work is that it will be happening all over the country. Not everyone who works in construction wants to travel long distances to sites.
Most people would prefer to work locally or at least within their county.
With almost every home needing some kind of upgrade there will be activity in every town and parish in the country.
SKILLED WORKERS
This will give a real boost to many areas with highly skilled workers staying at home instead of getting into vans to drive to Dublin, Cork or Galway every morning.
The number of people working in the sector is expected to grow from 4,000 to 17,000 by the middle of this decade.
This will no doubt be a challenge but we have been planning for this.
The government has committed €22m in the last budget to train up the highly skilled workers we need.
Two new retrofit centres of excellence will be up and running this year and three more in the pipeline for later this year.
One of the biggest barriers, in the past, has been how complicated it was. We are dealing with this through the roll out of One-Stop-Shops.
ONE-STOP-SHOP
My vision is that getting a home retrofit will be as easy as buying a car. You contact the One-Stop-Shop, you tell them what you want and can afford, and they do the rest.
They survey your home, design the upgrades, manage the grant process, deal with contractors, and even inspect the works at the end.
This investment will also help those in energy poverty. If you are in receipt of certain social welfare supports and your house has a low energy rating then it could be eligible for a retrofit free of charge. We are committing close to €200m to this scheme in 2022 to increase the pace of delivery.
We are also speeding up retrofitting of our social houses.
The Minister for Housing will invest a further €85 million as part of the Local Authority Retrofit Programme in 2022.
MAKING HOMES WARMER
This will make 2,400 of our social homes warmer and healthier by the end of the year.
It’s important to say that there is another big benefit of creating all these warmer homes – it’s protecting our planet.
We all want to see a decent future for our kids and right now they need us to take strong action to tackle climate change.
It won’t be easy weaning ourselves off imported fossil fuels by 2050 but if we work together we can do it and we can make Ireland a better place while we are at it.
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Of all the ways we can save the planet, retrofitting is a no-brainer.
It will lower our bills, build healthier and warmer homes, create jobs right around the country, tackle energy poverty and help save the planet. Win-win-win-win-win.
