Average homeowner facing €40,000 bill for 'one-stop-shop' deep retrofit upgrade

SEAI chief executive William Walsh told the committee that the country is starting to feel the “real impact of climate change here in Ireland”, as seen by recent flooding in Cork.

“The system is working to address climate change mitigation and adaptation measures, but it is under strain,” he said. “We need to build even greater capacity, system-wide, to enable us to show leadership on climate action, and to drive our revolution away from fossil fuels in Ireland.” 

The SEAI provides a range of grants and supports for home energy projects, including numerous retrofitting schemes. Households may be eligible for grants for the likes of insulation, solar panels and heat pumps, as well as electric vehicle chargers.

However, even with grants from the SEAI, for a household to do a “one-stop-shop" retrofit to bring their home to an A rating it costs them €39,388 on average, according to SEAI data.

Its director of retrofitting Ciaran Byrne, under questioning from Labour’s Alan Kelly, cited cost as a key issue and said the SEAI had “significantly increased” the value of some grant schemes in line with market rates.

“The minister signed during the last two weeks the instruments for the low-cost loan schemes which will be rolled out in Q1 of 2024,” Mr Byrne said. “And our analysis showed that this low-cost loan scheme will be transformative in terms of people engaging in retrofit.” 

Compliance

In the Comptroller and Auditor General report for 2022, one section looked at the performance of certain residential retrofit schemes. This report found that, of the retrofit works inspected by the SEAI, the initial pass rate was “low” with around half of the projects inspected on the better energy homes scheme requiring further work.

“Because the inspections are carried out on a targeted basis, the results are probably not representative of the standard of works overall,” the C&AG report said. “Nevertheless, they do indicate that there is a substantial risk of non-compliant work being carried out under both schemes.” 

The C&AG report also said that when factored in with Ireland’s commitment to reduce carbon emissions significantly by 2030, SEAI residential schemes in recent years “have so far contributed very modestly to the required emissions reduction and will deliver less than half of the overall residential target reduction”.

Mr Walsh said that inspections are meant to act as a deterrent against poor behaviour and reduce the risk of abuse of schemes or unintended outcomes. As well as that, SEAI inspections are targeted on the basis of risk.

“All contractors are subject to certain minimum rates of inspection. In most cases, where a property does not pass an inspection, there will only be a very small number of inspection points that have failed to meet standard,” Mr Walsh said. “Cases of serious non-compliance are rare.” 

'Lot of work to do'

Mr Byrne added that the average waiting time for fully-funded schemes such as warmer homes is now at 20 months, with 12,000 homes waiting to be surveyed at present.

He also said that 31 contractors have been de-registered for poor performance.

Social Democrat TD Catherine Murphy added that she’d heard from constituents that their home charger for their electric vehicle had been remotely turned off with no explanation given. Such situations could act as a deterrent for people to switch to electric vehicles in the future, she said.

SEAI officials said they were unaware of the issue and said they would look into the matter.

Also speaking at the committee was Department of the Environment secretary general, Oonagh Buckley, who was asked by chair and Sinn Féin TD Brian Stanley if she was confident Ireland could meet its target of reducing greenhouse gas emissions by 51% by 2030.

“We have quite a lot of work to do,” she said, adding that it’s a “huge delivery challenge” but that her department and the Government are “up for it” in terms of achieving its targets.