Could we see one off payments for EV’s and heat pumps?
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Text 51551 or email todaydmc at rte.ie. First this morning, the government is looking at one-off payments towards environmentally friendly energy measures like heat pumps and efficient cars. Tornished, as Simon Harris said over the weekend, several options are being considered. It comes at a time, of course, when there's mounting political pressure due to the global energy crisis and rising costs. For more on this, I'm joined on the line by Ellen Coyne, political correspondent with the Irish Times, and by Dr Paul Dean, senior lecturer in clean energy at University College Cork. Good morning to you both. Ellen, I might start with yourself. Can you take us through what's being considered here?
Sure, so this is obviously a fairly big concession by the government that even after digging three quarters of a billion euro out of its surplus to deal with the response to the fuel protests, obviously that is not enough. So Simon Harness kind of flagged this in a speech to the EPP in Dublin on Saturday and then was talking about it further yesterday. He is now trying to move to a position where either one-off grants or accessible finance would be made available on a one-off basis to people If they want to try to pursue more expensive, but ultimately more sustainable heating and car options, so like electric cars, installing heat pumps in your house, or maybe trying to switch to HVO, which is hydro-treated vegetable oil.
And in some scenarios that can be used to heat your home. Obviously, the backdrop to all of this is that the government is conscious that despite what everyone said in 2022 about the dangers of relying on volatile oil and energy markets that we have no control over. Europe has kind of made the same mistake again, has found ourselves in the same position. And it seems that the government is doubling down on trying to pursue just transition policies. We know we're not that popular. But the idea is that if people are able to switch to more sustainable energy models, then that is obviously cheaper than throwing three quarters of a billion euro at an economy that overly relies on carbon fuel for heating and transport.
Well, speaking of things that are unpopular, the government postponed the increase in the carbon tax that was due to take effect within the last couple of weeks. And revenue from the carbon taxes or much of it is ring fenced for these type of measures. So retrofitting schemes and so on. So presumably, are they going to have to rely on carbon tax increases in the future to fund these measures? Or is this money that will come out of the surplus? Do we know?
Well, I think, I mean, so obviously we know it's going to cost €22 million to have that delay from the 1st of May until the 14th of October. That was a direct result of the fuel protests. But I think the interesting context of this is that the fuel protests have kind of given rise to more criticism of the carbon tax than ever before. And the government used to cling to that as a kind of like infallible promise that they would never walk the carbon tax back. And I think there's probably a realisation in government that by the time we get to October, unfortunately, there's a non-zero chance that this war will be continuing. And as they learned after the one-off measures brought in after Russia's invasion of Ukraine, it's very difficult to kind of walk these things back.
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