 Yn ystafell, rydyn ni i gael ei hunain ar y cymdeithasau cymdeithasol. Rydyn ni'n gweithio gyda Jim Gannon, CEO o'r Fathgrifedd Cymdeithasol Llywodraeth Cymdeithasol, yn ddifigio ar y cymdeithasol, o'r cymdeithasol, o'r ffordd cymdeithasol o'r cymdeithasol, ac mae'n ddifigio ar y cymdeithasol o'r cyfrifedd cymdeithasol. Rydyn ni'n ddifigio ar gyfer y dyfodol o'r cyfanydd yn ydych chi'n meddwl Ier everywhere we will be having an extremely stimulating and wide-ranging presentation and discussion. A couple of practical things first. Please switch off your phones. Jim's address will be on the record and the slides will be available afterwards. Okay, and then we'll have a Q&A session afterwards which will follow Chatham House rules. Rwy'n mynd i'n hyn o'r gweithio, mae'n gweithio bod allan o'r gweithio'r gweithio ar y clyw yng Nghymru a Llywodraeth Cymru. Y 28 ym Mhwng, mae'n gweithio'r gweithio'r gweithio ar gyfer Caroline Westblom. Mae'n gyfnod Cann-Netwg Europe. Mae'n gweithio ar y cyfle cyffredinol gyda'r gweithio'r gweithio gyda'r gweithio'r gweithio ar gyfer Cann-Netwg. Mae'n gweithio'r gweithio cyffredinol cyffredinol gyda'r gweithio peirio cyffredinol gyda'r gyfer Cann-Netwg Europea. Mae'n gweithio'r 16 o dillun, mae'n cyfrifio'r gweithio'r gweithio'r 2018 EISB, EISB Llector Series, a'u gyllideb i'r EISB. Mae'r gychwyn i'r Prifeseir Jean-Michel Glachon, gyda'r Ysgol dros am Ysgol yng Nghymru, gan swyddi'r llwyllio arall, ychydigau a chyfnogau, ac mae'n ffnwyr dros yng Nghymru, ac mae'n mynd i ddim yn gwneud i gydigiau a phabwysig. Felly, mae'n gweithio ar draws gwahaniaeth. Yn y ymgyrch, mae'n rhoi bod oherwydd mae'n gweithio ar y cyfnod. Mae'r gweithio cyhoedd ymgyrchol yma, yr SAI, yn ysgol maen nhw yw 2016. Roedd cyfathorol yn gyfer y dyfodol, a'r grwp RPS, yn y rhan o gwleidio'r rhan o'r berffordd a'r rhan o'r hyn sydd yn cyrhafyd o rhan o'r berffordd o'r cyfathorol, yn cymhysig, ymddangosol, ynghylch, ymgyrchu, ymddangosol, ymddangosol, ymddangosol, ac yn ymddangosol o bwysig o gyfathorol, Abertaeth myfyrwch yn ymddiadol. Ddweud am ymddangos i'n gwrthoddiadau. Mae hi fyddwn i'n ni gwybod, mae'n ffrwg cyfnodol i'r byw, ac mae'n ddweud ymddangos i'n gwybod ymddiadol. Rwy'n gweithio yn ysgrif iawn, mae'n gweithio'r lleolau lleolau, yn cyfweld i'r mewn cyfweld, ac oedd yn cyfweld i'n cyfweld i'r lleolau. Mae'n gweithio'n gyfweld i'r lleolau perthynas o'r gwybodaeth yma. SAI's experience over the past number of years and our desire to increase social awareness, social acceptance perhaps, and then also in terms of specific decisions and interventions, increasing the application of behavioural economics and related sciences to the policy making process. I won't dwell on SAI, I believe most of you will know who we are, if not please visit our website. I'm going to briefly introduce where we are today with regard to our energy targets. Mention CO2, I'll speak to 2020 projections and also our 2030 challenges now that they are becoming clearer. And in that I will speak to the cultural relationship we have or do not have with infrastructure generally in Ireland. I'll move then on to behavioural economics, how SAI saw a need to educate ourselves better on that and to provide advice to our policy makers on that topic and then a couple of final closing thoughts. In terms of renewable energy in Ireland in 2017, and these are provisional figures, we had a relatively successful year. It was a good wind year in terms of capacity installation. With regard to transport we had an increase in the level of substitution of fuels. And with regard to heat there was a small level of decarbonisation but a lot of that might have been related to oil price and people's behaviour. And again oil price and people's behaviour is an important anchor point to have. In terms of CO2 briefly, decoupling can happen. I have a sense sometimes that there's a risk that Ireland will talk ourselves into failure. At the Project 2040 launch, Apologies last week, one of the contributors said that Martin Luther King didn't start a speech by saying, I have a nightmare and try to drive people towards change. He started by saying I have a dream and started leading people towards change with positive motivation, positive impact, positive interventions. So we have some good news stories in Ireland. In 2013 and 2014, despite strong economic growth, we reduced the CO2 intensity of our emissions from energy. In the next year, 2014 to 2015 and 2015 to 2016, our emissions increased but not at the same rate of economic increase. And last year, despite 4% modified domestic demand growth, which extracts aircraft leasing and IP transfers, again, our energy-related CO2 reduced by 2% or a little bit above. Our CO2 intensity in electricity reduced by over 9% in last year. So policy and private sector activity in tandem can have a material impact and does have a material impact. But a lot more to do. So in terms of our 2020 scenarios, last year SEAI would have seen us landing somewhere around 13.2% against a target of 16% overarching. This year we produced a number of analyses and that's due to the fact that our initial calculations would have started in October of last year for our projections this year prior to the announcement of the Capital Development Plan, which will see some impact on the ground prior to 2020 and also prior to a distinct change in oil price and the signal that that sends to consumers of oil, whether it be in your car or in Ireland in particular in your domestic heating. And these will have an influence. The net impact is that we still see ourselves reaching somewhere between 13% and 14% depending on some policy interventions that are made. In terms of 2030, you can take a number of different views. I think important to me is that Europe agreed a 32% level of renewables in energy about a week and a half ago. What that means for Ireland if you look at the 20% European target versus the 16% target we arrived at for 2020, it could see Ireland with an ask of about 26 or 27% of renewables by 2030. If that's the scale of ask, then we need significant activity across all sectors and the current methods we are using in a business as usual case likely may not reach the target. So we need new methods of decarbonisation. We need new methods of incentivising renewable electricity in this country. That said, I think it's very important to make the point that our expectation should not be that the national development plan and the Exchequer funding described in that is the limit of our ambitions. One thing that is true around the world and being realised by many, not just as a challenge but as a business opportunity, is that private sector finance and our organisation Sustainable Nation Ireland would speak to that quite well is required and at scale. And we're now working, I'm going to the Banking Federation of Ireland after this meeting. We are speaking to the EIB, private sector finance providers as well, on how we engage that finance. What is the regulatory planning, licensing and consenting framework that needs to be in place to attract private sector investment to decarbonisation? And that's with regards to large scale infrastructure but also importantly with regard to smaller scale interventions. How do we efficiently aggregate small scale interventions like domestic retrofit or SME energy efficiency? Where the amount of finance in each packet required is quite small but if we can bring them together it becomes attractive to institutional investors. In terms of global clean energy investment, again I suppose the prevailing wind is quite positive towards it. Lots of sustainable energy technologies are on mainstream. The value proposition around energy efficiency in large industry certainly is well recognised. In certain segments, even here in Ireland, lighting is seen to be an area where activity can increase and lots of new business models have come into Ireland in the past year and a half that provide people an ability to execute an energy efficiency project where they don't necessarily have the means to finance it themselves. I do think that there is a very obvious increased interest in international banks, structural funds and private sector funds over the last two years both in terms of infrastructure and in terms of on the ground investment in aggregate project types. So to my mind a positive out of this is that clean energy and energy efficiency isn't just an environmental fad anymore it's just a good use of capital in many cases. It is a good investment to make. It's a matter of looking to see where market failures are between good uses of capital in specific projects and the finance that may become available to those projects. And again, this is the type of activity that ourselves and also the people in Ireland are heavily involved in at the moment. I'm going to focus on renewable electricity for a minute to bring it down to a point around social acceptance and awareness. The cost curves for renewable electricity technologies are coming down quite quickly. And there is an opportunity there for Ireland to capitalize on this, taking the learnings from other jurisdictions as they deployed themselves renewable electricity. We are the sustainable energy authority of Ireland, not the renewable energy authority of Ireland. I think it's an important point to make in that our modelling exercises see Ireland using gas in particular for a number of years yet to come. It will take us a long time to decarbonise fully. Many of the international modelling exercises also see a requirement to use natural gas on a long-term pathway to decarbonising as it balances some of the intermittent generation we see coming down the line. Some of the challenges here for renewable electricity generation are obvious and they're spoken about quite a bit. We're on planning and consenting, market regulation and policy consistency and certainty. Also I think something that we don't speak to often is the scale of market in Ireland. Ireland, for a lot of the major international developers, is small scale. And the type of individual project you see in Ireland due to our spatial development pattern are smaller scale projects. So that large scale project where you can deploy lower cost finance, it's harder to find in Ireland. I think even if you imagine that you resolve some of these challenges and constraints, you are faced with that social challenge, that social acceptance challenge. And at the core of this is where we have a gap between society and its valuing of infrastructure. And I believe that this is across transport infrastructure, water infrastructure, energy infrastructure, you name it. For most people they don't engage or consciously think about infrastructure unless something goes wrong with it and there is a fault or unless new infrastructure is required and it's perceived as an imposition. That day-to-day salience or value of infrastructure and the value it provides you is at the core of a lot of our challenges. And I think it's quite important because people in a room like this can influence political will but political will is derived from voters and people on the ground. And one of our activities more recently, the Sustainable Energy Communities Network, provides mentors and support to communities whereby they develop their own master plan for their community to decarbonise. And we are finding certainly at a qualitative level, we're going to perform quantitative analysis on it in parallel, that attitudes are shifting and that those people involved in determining their own transition to a low-carbon economy become more aware of the fact that we need some of this infrastructure. There will be challenging projects in certain locations but they become aware that we may need pylons. We may need wind turbines but this has to go somewhere at some point in time. I think creating that link, creating that salience will become far more important as we increase our ambitions and the ask of Ireland is increased over the next number of years. So what do people in Ireland think? At a high level it's relatively positive. This is a Euro barometer survey, not a survey by anyone in Ireland or an NGO necessarily. So this asked a representative sample size what do you think about climate? 68% said climate was a very serious problem. Interestingly an additional 25% said that it was a fairly serious problem, fairly serious being a particularly Irish expression but it's on their radar nonetheless. 34% said that business and industry play a key role. Just behind the role they felt that the government and policy makers play. And then finally that fighting climate change can boost the economy. This is very important for businesses because as a business you supply a product or a service to a consumer and consumers are led by what is on the forecourt, what is in the shop and by their professional advisers. And separately you employ these people and the influence you have on these people and the type of person you want to attract can be heavily influenced by the signal you give. I think with this underlying belief and this underlying importance in people's minds we have started asking ourselves the question how does that impact us in SEAI and our day-to-day delivery of our activities? If this is underpinning people's beliefs how do we get them to interact more with our better energy homes scheme? How do we increase electric vehicle uptake? How do we get them to look at their oil boiler and consider alternatives? Whether it be a less carbon intensive fossil fuel or a transition to heat pump or other electric alternatives? I think something around this is quite important as well in that the Irish society and society generally is more interactive, is taking more control and there's an appetite here for change. I think that's being matched by technology cost where you see the cost of photovoltaic panels coming down the cost of technologies coming down that will allow a consumer to interact more with the system and interestingly this technology price curve is matching policy direction from Europe where Europe has started stating things like the clean energy package that they would like to see people with a right to generate in their home a right to export and a right to a market price. Now it's left to determine whether or not that falls down into local legislation, local SIs but that is the general direction of travel and to my mind there's an interesting point of divergence here where you'll have some people who want to be very engaged they want to have an app where they respond to a price signal from a market and they tell their dishwasher or their fridge or something else to switch on and switch off but the likelihood is that we will again be a consumer led market and someone could come along and say we already give you your telephony your broadband, your television channels we will add the energy service to your bill and we'll deal with the rest we'll deal with the controls, we'll deal with that headache don't worry about it, you can trust us and that's where trust becomes very important in that if we're accepting these technologies in this level of sophisticated control into our homes and we're giving that to someone else to control it in our home you need to trust and want the service that they will provide and this will be a challenge we face particularly as we start rolling out smart meters over the next number of years what is the value proposition for the human in their home as we look to place smart meters into that infrastructure so in terms of behavioural change activities that SEI is engaged in that led us to this front of wisdom would have been just trying to influence people and businesses so to reduce energy use, to install sustainable energy generation where it's cost effective, where it's sustainable to purchase energy efficient products, appliances looking at the energy labelling schemes and market surveillance authority role installing energy efficiency upgrades so this is the building envelope, the heavier pieces of kit and then again creating that link and understanding the value of sustainable energy in your home, in your business, in society on a day to day basis so our activity today runs across some of these programmes I mentioned an example earlier for our fuel poverty directed scheme we used to issue a letter that said would you like a free energy upgrade to your home that is worth and we insert the number and there's now a value suddenly to that energy upgrade to the home similarly across a couple of other programmes we're using smaller interventions at different points along with their decision making process to tie them to it so someone who applies for an initial building energy rating or not building energy rating, better energy homes grant to upgrade their home there is a drop out rate between that person who applies and the person who actually delivers down the line so we're trying to see how do we widen that sales pipeline for someone who becomes interested and signs up to a grant at the start making sure that we get a higher percentage of execution and delivery down the bottom end now it's key to us around this consumer choices making it easy for people so how do we increase awareness how do you make it understandable and just easier to execute separately how do we engage them at the right time so we're aware from our research that once every seven years people will generally decide to invest in their home it could be a small investment, could be a heavy investment but you have that one time in seven years to really engage with them and bring them towards deeper retrofit bring them towards a more decarbonised position how do you know when that's coming up how do you position yourself to make that timely I suppose finally you need to make it attractive they need to want to do it is it through a financial incentive is it through showing them that other people in their housing estate have already done it and that for that housing estate where your home is exactly like your neighbour's home you should be able to do this and cost effectively and finally how do you make it social which speaks to this second piece how do you let them know that other people just like them are doing it that this is what people are doing now and bring them down that road and bring them down that road of peer awareness and not necessarily peer pressure and this speaks to one of the frameworks that underpins behavioural economics which is the east framework how you make things easy, attractive, social and timely and SEAI had started looking at some of these aspects although not by design up to a couple of years ago a year and a half ago we determined that we wanted to get more involved in behavioural economics as a science and also determining how we could bring that value to our policy design role so for our department for all the departments notably housing planning and local government we assist in the policy optioneering space where a demand for policy is outlined whether through a European directive or from the political class and from the department we engage in that data and analysis piece that underpins the ultimate decision that is made in the department what became more important to us is that where these interventions approach a homeowner or a consumer or a small business in particular behavioural sciences had a lot to add the analysis and the empirical evidence that can be brought from behavioural tests can inform that policy decision making piece and again at a very simplistic level we started looking at economics should we continue on the path of grants to the mass market or should we start looking at different methods of incentivisation in certain cases should it be looking at low cost finance should it be a tax rebate in certain cases maybe an economic incentive isn't required at all it's a different method of incentivisation in terms of psychology how could we increase the salience of comfort and benefits in the home how do we reduce hassle factors how do we increase trust in the advice we give and also framing how do we provide that framework within someone's mind that leads them to the right decision and then finally making it social how do we use the activity of neighbours the activity of people just like you to encourage you to bring it on that path making the right decision I won't go into a list of behavioural interventions I suppose what happened was that we started reading papers about behavioural science and behavioural economics and realised that there was an awful lot more under the bonnet than we realised as a result we put together a behavioural economics team that examines economics, psychology and sociology I think what's important is that there are a wide range of potential interventions and varied impacts from all of them I think what's important from our perspective is keeping an open mind similar to the technologies we will have to use to decarbonise Ireland over the next number of years there is no single solution there is no single intervention in certain cases we might not know the specific pieces of an intervention that really had an impact the plastic bag lovely was cited earlier and it can be hard to disentangle whether that was a social framework and people felt almost pressurised because people weren't using plastic bags anymore or was it the personal decision whether it was the actual cost or the principle of paying 5 cent was the motivating factor in either case it worked and in effect might be harder to link I think we also need to recognise fairly clearly that there are differences in local economic and social conditions and as we conducted our review that we are publishing next month this became more and more apparent just because a behavioural economic intervention worked in a particular jurisdiction doesn't mean it will necessarily work here in Ireland where we could have different social economic or other underpinning I suppose environmental conditions briefly an insight into our review we reviewed nearly two and a half thousand papers we took that down to an abstract level and determined which could be of most value to our review we brought that down to 175 papers then which we looked at in detail and these were papers which described empirical tests that we felt were delivered in a robust way of behavioural economic interventions it was not lab-scale testing it was in the field testing in each case of interventions that may or may not have worked in terms of reporting apologies, in terms of reporting outcomes we'll publish in July it will be very open in terms of its publication we'll be inviting people to engage with us to ask questions on the case studies that we're looking at and also at the end of the report we do come forward with recommendations the range of different interventions that are there that you could look at is staggering and it will be important that we prioritise and we approach it in a timely way and that there are some interventions where we feel you could have an impact in a short space of time so let's go ahead and try those now in other cases we'll work with either policy delivery or we'll work with private sector entities such as energy supply companies right now to see what can we build in over a longer period of time some of the reporting outcomes were that there's too much emphasis being placed on the residential sector there's very little being placed on the commercial sector and although industry makes decisions in a different framework small, medium enterprise does have a decision making paradigm that is similar to the residential sector so we think there are more learnings and more tests that can be put in place there there's a very small focus on what works for encouraging energy efficient measures as distinct from other behavioural measures so behavioural change in terms of someone leaving a room and switching on or off a light at the right time or changing the setting on their thermostat quite a bit of focus on that less focus on what incentivises someone to purchase something that is more energy efficient or make that installation choice where they will pay a premium for upgrading their building, their business and and there was a very low focus on the actual energy saving associated with the programmes so for SCAI we are focused on the outcome, the real impact of this intervention so to our mind and I'll cite a couple of examples later what we want to know is that for years one, three and five that the intervention made had an impact that stuck and again reflecting back on this piece trying to get someone to change their behaviour in terms of switching on and off lights there can be quite a bit of rebound there whereas if you convince someone to make a purchasing decision that changes their decision from applying a B-rated appliance to an A-rated appliance that appliance will be in place performing that function over a period of time if you can change their behaviour where they want to upgrade their home to include aspects of energy efficiency or decarbonisation in particular that will stand the test of time so again for us we really want to focus on impact, how do you lead people to decisions that have a lasting impact as opposed to a short term change of their mentality one interesting area for us that highlighted something more general was we don't need to necessarily develop new routes to market in each of these cases so in some cases we need to look at how we communicate more efficient driving or improving your car's performance from energy efficiency and safety perspective by going with a better tyre to people so instead of trying to develop a new route and broad brush advertising let's look at the NCT where many people sit every year worried about the performance of their car can we engage them at that point in time everyone gets a tax certificate and mostly people get an insurance certificate every year can we use that point of contact that point of concern to deliver a message there I've already mentioned the warmer homes the warmer homes proposition around value one other case is with the generic energy bill that people receive some electronically, some on hard copy and there are cases internationally where you can bring a lot more value to the customer through the energy bill one example is where they started showing people how they performed against homes that were just like theirs and there has been an impact a lasting impact from that sort of communication this is something where we can interact with energy supply companies on this front and in quite a short period of time two other specific examples one was O Power on Honeywell where people were given a more sophisticated control over their energy use in the States and also they were given one of these home energy reports that was intended to engage them in that peer effect how am I doing against my peers against homes that are more like my own this is a suggestion of savings of between 2% and 5% a separate one in Germany was on defaulting and defaulting is analogous to some other examples such as pensions if you were defaulted into a pension and that is your starting point some may choose to come out of a pension if you were defaulted into being a donor of organs more people will stay with that default position than will choose not to be is the non-participating most people will stick with that so in Germany they defaulted 150,000 electricity consumers to a green tariff these consumers were told that the green tariff was more expensive than the alternative tariff which would have been conventional energy yet over 90% of people stayed with that green tariff our challenge to this study was the after two months or to my mind it comes back to this frequency of decision making and within that two month period how many were likely to change their energy supplier in that period in any case so my interest is in if they were defaulted to that how long did that stick for is it one, is it two, is it three years down the line but nevertheless it shows the power of defaulting and that is one of the areas we feel that early activity could benefit us in terms of what next in SCAI we have an upgraded BER advisory report coming out so the building energy rating in Ireland was of its time it required an update in terms of the sophistication of assessment and also the sophistication of how we communicate that to the homeowner and we have intentionally involved our behavioural economics unit in the design of that report using priesthood and other jurisdictions so when you get a building energy report that previously wouldn't have gone into specific detail about your home as much as it might the new report which will come out in August will go into very specific detail about how your type of home with the condition it's in can be upgraded along a certain pathway and again we've used different types of signalling here up the top is loss aversion instead of saying if you invest this much you can save this much it's saying you are currently losing this amount of money for not having made a certain decision we're also using benchmarking against houses of a similar type and we're also using an approach around meaningful benefits trying to make it tangible to people how their home could benefit and how they could benefit in their lives I think another aspect that's important in this is tying the behavioural economics piece to that value in the consumer's mind it is something that we are looking at and will continue looking at in SEAI whether we would continue providing grants for measures so you provide a grant for insulation you provide a grant for heating controls we need to have a more informed and a more engaged consumer if we want to move to a paradigm where we're saying your house is at D2 if you move it to C1 or B2 or A2 the amount of grant funding that is available so your funding performance as opposed to funding specific measures this sort of gap well this sort of gap around awareness and understanding could help be filled by the communications aspects I suppose and targeting of behavioural economics finally and apologies for the ramble although focused on individual decisions and we do expect to take a pragmatic approach on this there might be percentage changes here or there you have exceptional cases like the plastic bag levy where there was a huge return and a huge response to the incentive that was put in place but our expectation is a rational one where we expect small incremental change in the decisions of home owners over a period of time so 2%, 5%, 10% here in SMEs a 2% change a 5% change, a 10% change here we don't expect that this will solve the problem in and of itself it is just another value adding lens through which policy should be viewed particularly in the development stages separately the report that we are producing should be considered just a starting point it will be very important after the publication of the report that we prioritise that we work with people in the public sector and the private sector to say which interventions should we look at first where will value be derived and how do we communicate that to consumers, to business owners and to those who will be involved in the development of the intervention and finally we do have a true belief that informing and empowering and motivating the individual can have an influence not just on their smaller scale decisions but also on how they perceive large scale infrastructure projects and technology adoption and I think we are about to see analogues of social acceptance to large scale infrastructure around some of the smaller scale but high aggregation infrastructures that are coming into place the first by illustration will be around smart meters it is not a single piece of infrastructure a single pylon, a single substation a single wind farm it is a large scale aggregation of small interventions where societal thought will coalesce around it how do you make people value that infrastructure, accept it want to interact with it and be around electric vehicles or around electrification or other uses or other I suppose options for heating so again I think linking the small to the large is quite important we have seen evidence of it in our Sustainable Energy Community Network and we will continue to drive things in that direction that is the end of the formal presentation piece again sorry for the slightly inchoate nature is a topic that is new to us