The Renewable Energy Support Scheme (RESS) has been designed to replace the previous Renewable Energy Feed-in Tariff (REFIT) schemes that closed in December 2015.
The RESS scheme is designed to help promote the generation of electricity from renewable sources and will ultimately help Ireland achieve some of its Climate Action goals as outlined in the Climate Action Plan. Some of these goals include:
- Achieving 70% electricity generated from renewable sources by 2030.
- Reduce emissions from the public sector by 30% by 2030.
- Increase the number of electric vehicles (EVs) by 2030 to circa 1mn.
These goals have been developed to help Ireland fall in line with EU emissions targets. Ireland has missed the decarbonisation target set for the period 2013 to 2020, as seen in Figure 1. More worrying is that non ETS emissions grew by 4.7% in 2018 and without intervention this may put Ireland on a trajectory to be over 25% off target for the next 2021-2030 accounting period.
Source: DCCAE