New project to retrofit homes in rural counties passed over by private sector providers

However, a solution is on the way in four rural counties; led by community champions and technology advisors who hope to encourage rural homeowners to band together and retrofit their homes.

The scheme is one of 17 projects backed by the Government’s Community Climate Action Programme (Strand 2) and it was officially launched by the Minister for the Environment, Climate and Communications, Eamon Ryan, on May 5.

If the scheme being piloted in counties Cavan, Leitrim, Monaghan and Sligo proves a success, it will be expanded to take in counties Galway, Mayo and Donegal, quadrupling its impact. It hasn’t happened before now because – with the best will in the world – there was nobody to do the heavy lifting.

Gavin Forkan, managing director of PlanEnergy which employs 20 technical advisors on renewables and energy efficiency, spoke at the launch, which was held in the Atlantic Technological University in Sligo (where his company is based).

“The dispersed population means that it’s less attractive for retrofit contractors to do a bunch of houses in for example rural County Leitrim than it is in urban areas,” he said.

“The core of this project is that we will develop a community-led retrofit service – with the materials, tools and techniques developed in the communities for communities to run retrofit projects, overcoming the barriers that they currently face.

Retrofit Ready is spearheaded by a consortium led by the Irish Local Development Network with PlanEnergy, Sligo ATU and four local development companies – Sligo Leader Partnership, Leitrim Development Company, and Cavan County Local Development. It will be administered through Pobal.

“We’re focusing on four counties that have around 110,000 homes and, if we’re to align with national targets for retrofit, then 25,000 homes in those four counties need to be upgraded by 2030,” said Forkan.

Stumbling Block

“The aim is to transfer technical knowledge to the community retrofit champions. Those people have the key role. Owen McConnon (Cavan/ Monaghan) and Kyle Flynn (Sligo/ Leitrim) are our local champions,” continued Forkan.

“This is a full-time paid resource in the counties where we didn’t have that resource before. It was always a stumbling block when we came to executing a project at local level.

There was nobody to lift phones, there was nobody to drive a project forward. And this is the point of this role,” he said. “We’ve got a busy couple of years ahead. Phase one is underway, the initial assessment of where we stand – analysing the knowledge gap in local community,” he said.

That means talking to retrofitting contractors and understanding the challenges facing communities – some being poorer than others.

“Not every solution fits every house or every family, so it really needs to be very flexible and that’s phase two – bringing together groups of homeowners for funding applications.

Some communities will be quite wealthy and they’ll be well able to execute a project, so we need to have a different set of messages for those communities as for other communities.

“We see knowledge going in two directions. We’ll be learning how to establish community-centred energy working groups. Communities will be learning by doing a lot of the work themselves. We’ll be guiding them, but they’ll be doing much of the work.”

Developing a toolkit that captures the learning was important. “Then we’ll have the ability to replicate in Donegal, Mayo and Galway, and that would quadruple the number of homes we can target.

“This project could lend itself pretty well to other sustainability initiatives around community-led biodiversity,” he concluded.

 

Minister’s Forecast

Minister Eamon Ryan believes that the narrative on climate action is about to change. “Mark my words – things are about to change. It’s changing here now,” he said. “We got the first quarter figures last week and ten thousand houses have been retrofitted, ahead of where we said we’d get as we ramp everything up.”

“Watch the solar panels go up right across this country. Changes in agriculture will happen, because the myth that farmers are against this is not the case. This urban versus rural green nonsense – it will stop. And we need to change the transport system. That’s probably the hardest part,” he said.

Speaking of “green energy, green agriculture, green jobs”, the Minister added, “When people hear ‘We need to act on climate change’, some ask ‘Why should I do it? The Chinese aren’t doing it. Why should I do it when we’re so small?’”

“I say, ‘That doesn’t matter – our size. And that’s not true that the Chinese are not doing it.” The Minister for the Environment, Climate, Communications and Transport was impressed at what he saw during a visit to China in March.

“We met one company in China delivering 45 gigawatts of solar. I spent a fantastic 10 days there, in honour of Saint Patrick, and we were blown away. If we think Europe is going in this direction and so is America – well, we’re only catching up with China where seven million engineers a year graduate.”

Maureen’s Kitchen

“The great thing about taking action is that everywhere is central, everywhere is on the front line, everywhere has the same opportunity to be centre stage, because it’s local as well as global.

“And we in this country have every chance to be good at this,” he said. Earlier that day, he met a homeowner who retrofitted her house.

“We were in Maureen’s kitchen, she’s going on 69 and she’s just got the house done up, with the heat pump outside.” He remarked on the relationship she built up with the development worker who persuaded her “to get out of the house and let them put in the insulation, put in the heat pump”.

“She spoke such simple truths about the benefits, saying ‘I should be paying 70 euro a week’ (for heating). Instead, she was saving money.

“It’s hard for that lady Maureen to change, to get out of the kitchen for two months, at a cost of 60 grand, but she did it,” said the Minister, wishing the Retrofit Ready Scheme well.