 First of all, thank you very much indeed for the introduction and specifically for the invitation to join with you this morning. What has been an absolutely fascinating event I have to say. Can I congratulate WIEA and TEPSA for organising it because I must say I have learned a great deal and I hope to be able to continue in some small measure that high level of discussion by presenting some issues today on the area of energy. Minister Robert has already mentioned that our latest hot paper, if you wish, is a communication that we published last week on the internal energy market, specifically on electricity and gas, and I have to say that it makes sober reading because it points to the fact that we do not have an internal energy market in Europe, that we are making very slow progress towards an internal energy market and that quite honestly we need to get our act together. As an illustration of that you can see from this slide that we still have, despite a supposedly internal market, quite a few member states who regulate the price of energy at household and or industrial level frequently in isolation of the actual costs of producing the power. In some member states this has led to what we call an internal deficit of 2 billion euros in Portugal and an internal deficit of 24 billion euros in Spain. We really have some issues to deal with there as we go forward in terms of achieving the internal market. The internal market of itself is not an ideal logical objective. It's a purposeful process of bringing about an efficient, effective, secure, affordable energy system for the consumers within the European Union. This is what I say when I stand up with speeches, this is what we believe very fervently. I'm afraid at this point in time a consumer in Europe doesn't believe this. A recent survey asked what was the level of trust that consumers in Europe had for various service markets. And I'm very sorry to say that the energy market came 26th out of 30. So consumers in Europe I'm afraid are disillusioned with the energy market and are not convinced by the rhetoric that we have come out with over the last little while about an internal market and how this is going to deliver wondrous things for them. This leads to the question, what are we going to do? Well I think it's fair to say that we have to change our energy system and we perhaps need to communicate more realistically on why we need to change the energy system and what it involves in order to change that energy system. We are well advanced down a process, I would say a global leadership process of changing our energy system in Europe to meet our climate change goals to reduce our greenhouse gas emissions. But it's not just a question of dealing with climate change. We are at a point in time in Europe where our generation fleet is aging to the point where it needs to be renewed. And whilst this is a very expensive operation it presents us with an opportunity to make a choice. To make a choice as to the kind of energy system that we want going forward into the future. And I want to just signal a few of the issues that just raise them for consideration as to how we might make those choices going forward into the future. I was always keeping in mind what it is we need to do in terms of delivering on a competitive, secure and sustainable energy market. Europe is highly dependent on imports. More than 75% of our imports come from outside and you can see that we spend lots of money and send it abroad to various parts of the world each year. In fact in 2010 we sent 270 billion euros out of the European Union to other parts of the world for them to spend. In Ireland, Ireland is equally dependent on imports of energy. If you look at the headline cases we spend approximately 2.6 billion euros a year which represents 1.6% of GDP on the imports of energy. And again this is money that's going elsewhere out of the Irish economy and therefore cannot circulate within the Irish economy. So I think we have a choice. We have choices to how we take forward the challenges generally in Europe but specifically in Ireland. So I want to raise one of the choices which of course is a favour of mine and that is the issue of energy efficiency. Energy efficiency has a value. Of course it has a cost because it's very hard to achieve energy efficiency without investment but the return is huge. If we achieve our 20% energy efficiency target it's the equivalent of the GDP of Portugal. Just to put it into perspective it is enormous. It is 1,000 less coal power plants. It is huge the amount of savings and this is money that we don't have to spend and yet we don't have to compromise on our economic capacity in the process of doing it. One of the issues and this is a challenge I would say Minister for Ireland as its presidency would be chairing the first issurance of national targets for energy efficiency. As a result of the adoption of the energy efficiency directive Member States must indicate their own national targets for energy efficiency by April of next year as part of the European semester. And of course the real question that we are to some extent waiting to see is when we add up the national targets will we get to 20% or not? And of course if we don't what happens then? I'll keep everybody in suspense. But there's one other area that I think not only will Ireland preside the discussions around these national targets but I think if I could suggest there is an area where Ireland could perhaps take leadership as other Member States have done with some of the actions that they have taken and I'd like in that context to focus specifically on buildings. Buildings represent more than one third of the energy that we consume and we use that energy primarily well in Ireland for heating in the south of Europe a little bit for cooling as well. So the question is can we achieve savings in terms of the energies that we use in our buildings and I'm just going to flick up a few charts here because being Irish I'm always fascinated to see what the housing structure is and the building structure is both in Ireland and in other parts of Europe but you can see that for example Ireland tops the ranking in terms of the average floor space available to single family houses. Bet you didn't know that. Secondly in terms of the age of the building stock and I'll be leaving these slides because they're a little bit hard to see. You can see that well this is not a surprise Ireland, Spain have some of the newest housing stock in the European Union. This is not a surprise as you can imagine and of course the eastern European states have some of the older housing stocks. What do we tend to use as fuel to heat our homes? Well this is a little chart showing the case for the south of Europe which Spain in this instance Poland rather which is in the east and France which is not exactly typical but in France the predominant or a predominant fuel source for heating is electricity. I know that when I grew up we had this electric bar heating and if you turned it on in the morning my father would give me a clip in the air and say do you know how much that costs so I have grown up all my life with this horror of how much it costs to heat anything electrically but of course that's way back then we're in a different world now electric heating is a different ballgame as they say. In France it's a particularly different ballgame because they have nuclear so they have a policy of generating electricity and they have a policy of using the electricity in their heating but in Ireland I'm sure you're aware that we have a gas pipe town gas pipe system in place it doesn't cover the entire country and as a consequence 1.1 million houses in Ireland heats their homes using oil oil and as a consequence the CO2 emission per square meter is highest in Ireland of all member states so this is a double or even treble family not only are we using imported oil with the highest divisions it costs us a lot of money as individuals so my suggestion to the Irish to think about because I understand that retrofit of buildings is an objective it's expensive it's an objective we have to go for it but it's expensive so let's take a smaller bite of the cake and say maybe we could focus just on this one specific issue in Ireland it's a peculiarity of the Irish system 1.1 million homes currently with oil central heating systems at the moment as I understand from my colleagues in Ireland thank you very much for the information the replacement rate is 6% so 66,000 of these heating systems are upgraded are changed each year depending on what you change into and for the purposes of this exercise and I am not here to do a sales pitch on any one technology over another but the technology we have used in the analysis is heat pumps air sourced heat pumps because of course ground sourced these pumps are much more expensive they're more efficient of course but they're much more expensive so let's take at the modesty price air sourced heat pump and install that instead of the oil boiler it means for the consumer they will save each year each year 1,000 euro which can be used of course to make the repayment because it will cost money to make the change this I fully understand but as well as that not only will Ireland benefit from reduced CO2 emissions almost for free out of this and it will also reduce the amount of money that's been sent each year to Mr Putin and his colleagues so one suggestion is how about a target of doubling the rate of replacement of oil fire boilers in Ireland per annum just as a suggestion second issue that I'd like to raise is the whole question of renewables I spend my life frankly defending feed-in tariffs and feed-in premier for renewable energy this will come as no surprise because there are lots of people out there who don't like the idea that these special little babies get feed-in tariffs and feed-in premier in Europe and I'd like to dispel some of the myths that exist around renewable energies so the first thing is that the support systems that are in place for renewable energies are visible what you get is what you see on the page nothing is hidden unlike fossil fuels and I quote the international energy agency's most recent publication this week of the world energy outlook where fossil fuels receive more than double the support of renewables at a global level but of course it's not as visible is it? so this is a constant battle that we have but let me put into perspective a little bit what it means to have renewable energy and I'm going to talk about Ireland because it's very relevant I think here in Ireland I'm not going to stand over the final precision of these figures but it's indicative you're a megawatt of energy from wind, ballpark capital, OPEX costs 81 euros for combined cycling gas turbines it's about 74 this can change in different member states but it's a very rough ballpark figure of where we're at so it looks as if renewables are more expensive which is why we have a support system in place but let's look at what it means for the economy and here I've compared France and the UK and you can see that in the UK out of the 81 euros they are retaining 58 euros in the economy in the UK as opposed to returning 16 of the 74 for CCGT of course the situation is different in the UK because they have their own gas so they're able to retain the expenditure within their own economy but we don't have that luxury and lots of member states in Europe don't have that luxury either and therefore they're sending their money elsewhere to their own economy what does it mean in terms of jobs again it will vary but on average you're looking at at least twice as many jobs in the wind sector as you will in the gas turbine sector and this is of course jobs that will come directly from the generation the indirect support and of course induced jobs because as we all know when you have a factory in a locality it generates jobs that are unrelated to the factory itself so they are induced jobs so we can't forget that there are jobs and important jobs linked to it but perhaps even more importantly what are the tax returns to the economy out of wind generated power versus gas produced power and you can see here that for every in Germany the return to the economy in Germany is 52 cents out of every euro it's huge but I can explain that it's huge because Germany has the highest energy prices in Europe it has 50% of its price is a tax so that's your first source of tax your second source of tax is VAT your third source is corporate tax and of course don't forget the jobs that I've just mentioned and the taxes that they will pay both from the individual and from the employer so you can see that the return of the original 81 that I was talking about into the economy is very significant when it's your own energy and in the case of wind it's our energy so my message is the net cost to the economy of renewable energy in this case wind is much much smaller than the net cost to the economy of the apparently cheaper imported fossil fuel and that's part of the message I'd like to leave in your head because yes we have tariffs in place for renewables because it's an emerging technology and yes we have to look and keep them up to speed and make sure that they reflect the accurate cost of real technology and their rollout their rollout into the market but let's not forget the wider economic benefits that also exist with regard to producing our own energy producing our own fuel sources I'm very conscious of time so I'm going to conclude I sat here this morning and I suddenly said to myself we've been talking about a banking crisis and part of the reason why we have a banking crisis is because when all of this started Member States had their own system and they wanted to keep their own system and they weren't prepared to play and share we have a provision in the treaty about energy and energy mix which says energy mix shall be determined by Member States and I must confess I sat there this morning and said to myself is energy our next banking crisis because the reality is you cannot have national energy systems not today and not going forward you cannot do things in your own little corner in isolation of your neighbours and if we continue to do so it will end up costing us and by that I mean all of us an awful lot more money than if we collaborate and work together from the outset so on that basis my recommendation is let's pick our no regret options let's move on them move as fast as possible and get the benefit thank you very much indeed