A chara, – ESB chief executive Pat O'Doherty ("Future shock – ESB powers towards transformation", October 5th) envisages an "energy future that will see householders becoming generators as well as consumers . . . They might also generate their own electricity from solar cells and use that to power their households and sell excess back to the grid. I wouldn't be surprised if within a few years a third of our customers are generating their own electricity."
If only! On my experience, I would be very surprised. Solar panels for generating electricity have come down a lot in price. But as matters stand, it seems only one company, Electric Ireland, will pay the customer anything at all for the electricity from micro-generation such as rooftop PV solar panels.
Electric Ireland’s miserly 9 cent per kWh contrasts with what they charge a domestic customer – up to twice that. There is no certainty at present of that being continued after December 2016, and they no longer accept new customers to the “pilot scheme”. These policy decisions are an extreme disincentive to “householders becoming generators”. I do not know whether the decisions come from Electric Ireland, or the ESB, or the Commission for Energy Regulation, or from the Government, but there needs to be urgent radical change if Mr O’Doherty’s fine vision is not to suffer a “future shock” of the negative kind. – Is mise,
PÁDRAIG McCARTHY,
Sandyford,
Dublin 16.