CCAC recommends extra €10k in grants over purchase of EVs
The Climate Change Advisory Council (CCAC) is recommending that the Government provides an additional €10,000 in grants to low income households for the purchase of electric vehicles, particularly in areas with limited access to public transport.
It is also calling for scrappage schemes and other transport-related incentives to help accelerate the switch to battery-electric vehicles and decarbonise private transport.
The transport sector already accounts for 43% of all energy used in Ireland.
However, the sale of highly efficient battery electric vehicles fell by 24% last year, while greenhouse gas emissions reductions from public transport and more efficient cars were effectively wiped out because of the growth in demand for transport.
The CCAC is alarmed by these trends, especially since a 50% reduction in transport emissions must be delivered by 2030.
Its annual review of the transport sector calls for urgent Government intervention to support sustained emissions reductions and more to be done to encourage people to switch to public transport.
It notes that 773,000 primary and post-primary pupils do not have access to the School Transport Scheme; that 50% of students travel to their place of education by car; and that almost one in five car journeys nationwide are for the purpose of education.
The council says it strongly supports expanding eligibility for the heavily subsidised school bus scheme as well as greater integration of school transport and public transport services.
It is also calling for an expansion of the Safe Routes to School Programme to support the required shift in the sector.
According to its report, the total stock of Battery Electric Vehicles on Irish roads at the end of last year was 72,640. This is just 3.05% of the total passenger car fleet.
The Climate Change Advisory Council wants existing incentives for electric vehicles to be maintained and enhanced but says the EV grant system needs to be refocused.
Its call is for increased supports for purchasing more efficient and cheaper electric vehicles, including second-hand EVs.
However, it says those additional supports should be focused on areas with the poorest access to public transport services and Just Transition Principles.
Additional grants of up to €10,000 for fully electric vehicles costing less than €35,000 for lower income households will be key, it says.
It is also calling for an accelerated roll-out of publicly accessible electric vehicle charging infrastructure alongside the ambitious roll-out of electricity network reinforcement.
At the end of last year there were 2,802 publicly accessible "slower" AC charging points and 786 fast DC charging points for electric vehicles.
This equates to seven charging points per 10,000 people in Ireland, which is considerably below the EU-27 average of 20 charging points per 10,000 people, or the average of 13 per 10,000 people in the UK.
Over €294 million was allocated in funding for active travel infrastructure this year, bringing the total investment since 2020 to over €1.25 billion.
In terms of mode share, cycling increased slightly from 1.8% of journeys in 2022 to 1.9% in 2023.
Meanwhile, walking declined from 19.3% of trips to 17.7% overall.
Commenting on the launch of the Transport Review, Marie Donnelly, Chair of the Climate Change Advisory Council said: "Transport is Ireland's biggest source of energy demand, and emissions from the sector must reduce by half if the sector is meet its target.
"To achieve this, urgent and decisive action must now be taken by Government to end our reliance on fossil fuels and deliver the kind of transformative change that is required in this sector.
"We have seen signs of progress in public transport with more than half of the redesigned BusConnects network in Dublin implemented, a 48% increase in passenger boardings on redesigned routes, and a significant growth in the number of EV and hybrid buses on our roads.
"However much more must be done to improve the integration of school transport with public transport services, which will be vital in helping to reduce car journeys and tackle emissions."
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Irish Times
27 minutes ago
- Irish Times
House not private for drowned Leinster House fox as TDs serve up groundhog day of Dáil sniping
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It mirrored so many discussions from sittings past The Opposition urged him to rethink and change his approach. It's depressing. Dáil observers could have written the script for Tuesday's session. It mirrored so many discussions from sittings past. There were the usual testing exchanges between the Taoiseach and Sinn Féin leader Mary Lou McDonald. Micheál gave up on Mary Lou a long time ago. The feeling is mutual. A tart 'blah, blah, blah' was her response to one of his replies on Tuesday. But Labour leader Ivana Bacik remains a terrible disappointment to him. Micheál says he understands – she's part of the Opposition, so it's in the game plan to give him a hard time. But he gets very ratty when she criticises his Government's efforts to ease the housing crisis – 'chaotic' was what she called them. In fairness, she had a point. Whatever about the merit of the parcel of proposals dropped last week by Minister for Housing James Browne, the method of their delivery was a mess. 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'No more incoherent policy changes.' She said the Government must 'scale up its effort and ambition' if it is to make any impact on the situation. What he should not do is 'waste time and money on Bertienomics era tax breaks for developers'. There are plenty of excellent suggestions he could take on board from Ivana's party, for example. Why not consider 'other urgent and ambitious proposals' for fixing the crisis? 'Why do you not adopt our policies on protection for renters?' she asked. There endeth the lesson from Dublin Bay South. Micheál wasn't having this, no more than he was accepting accusations that he is not taking political responsibility for driving housing reform. He listed all their early achievements on the housing front 'since the Government came in a number of months ago, in January'. Only a wet weekend in the job and they're flying. It's not easy, coming fresh into a new managerial position and having to clean up after the previous occupant. 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Irish Times
28 minutes ago
- Irish Times
Thousands of holiday lets will need planning permission due to Rent Pressure Zone changes
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Irish Times
an hour ago
- Irish Times
Should electric car incentives be more creative?
Q: Should governments/cities offer citizens shared mobility vouchers or a car scrappage scheme as an alternative to grants and incentives for the encouragement of EV private car ownership, to make better use of vehicles and speed up the electrification of our transport? And are autonomous robo taxis the next evolution of public transport? – Cormack McK, Co Dublin A: The first question here is particularly pertinent, as there does seem to be a groundswell towards a new scrappage scheme to encourage Irish car buyers to opt for an electric car next time out. It's certainly worked in the past. Back in 2000, a scrappage scheme that encouraged owners of older, less-safe vehicles to trade-in for a new set of wheels arguably overperformed, and saw the Irish market for new cars jump to a record of 247,000 sales. Ever since then, the Irish car trade has been moaning that it doesn't sell enough cars. There was another scrappage boost in 2009, aimed to lure motorists towards cars with lower CO2 emissions (ironically, largely diesel-engine cars) while also helping the motor trade weather the dire economic headwinds of the time. READ MORE Both certainly put more cars on the road than would have otherwise been the case. However, there are inevitably trap doors when it comes to scrappage schemes. Many consider a scrappage scheme to be an inequitable way to distribute finite State funds. The claim is that such incentives are merely subsidising car purchases for the well-off in society. Equally, there's a solid argument that finite funds should be prioritising public transport over private, especially if we really want to make a dent in CO2 emissions. Electric cars certainly have their place in that reduction, but they're not the be-all and end-all for lowering carbon emissions. It's also often dismayingly easy to game a scrappage scheme unless very strict terms and conditions are applied and we've been burned by scrappage in the past. In 2009, the scrappage scheme was meant to encourage people to buy cars with lower CO2 emissions, which it duly did. [ EV Q&A: Should I buy an out-of-warranty, used electric car? Opens in new window ] However, as noted above, almost all of those cars came with diesel engines. First off, diesel power did most certainly not suit everyone's driving style, as legions of clogged-up diesel particulate filters came to prove. Secondly, Dieselgate was just around the corner. While it certainly seems that encouraging everyone to shift to electric motoring is the right thing to do, it's worth remembering that many of us thought diesel was the right thing to do in 2009. We don't have the luxury of a second go at this. It certainly seems as if a potential scrappage scheme would encourage more interest in electric cars. Second-hand classified site Carzone has seen EV searches up 16 per cent year-on-year. 'Models such as the Volkswagen ID4 , Tesla Model 3 , BYD Atto 3 and Hyundai Ioniq 5 remain among the most searched, reflecting the growing appetite among Irish motorists,' according to Carzone. 'However, barriers such as cost, charging infrastructure and range remain significant considerations. A well-structured scheme that addresses these challenges would play an important role in making EV ownership more accessible.' And therein lies a significant problem. The Government already offers as much as €8,500 off the price of a new electric car in grants and incentives, as well as other ongoing savings. Yet EV sales, although growing, are nowhere near where we thought they'd be. EVs are also becoming cheaper, due to the tumbling cost of batteries, so would a scrappage scheme that offered maybe €1,000 or €1,500 off the price of a new electric car make that big a difference? Possibly not, and even if it did, the argument that such a scheme is just aiding car purchases for the well-off would still echo. Surely the issue of getting more EVs on the road would be better tackled by more effort in improving the charging network. More fast chargers are being added, driven by EU legislation, but we're well behind others when it comes to setting up slower chargers in car parks and on kerbsides, and the cost of public charging is fast becoming a barrier to uptake. Running an EV is cheap if you're doing most of your charging at home, but it's far from affordable if you're reliant on the public charging network. The idea of shared mobility vouchers is an interesting one, and Ireland is – again – well behind the curve when it comes to the affordability of public transport (not to mention its availability). A recent trip to Prague, for example, showed that a monthly ticket for public transport covering buses, trams, metro and local trains costs the equivalent of €22, and there's a discount for students and minors, which means it costs them just €5.20. Even at the best Taxsaver rate, a monthly ticket for Dublin commuters costs €45, and that's just for Zone One. Clearly, providing better and more affordable public transport would be a massive boost to carbon reduction figures, not to mention potentially a tool for regenerating city centres. As for autonomous 'robo atxis' – don't hold your breath. Such technology certainly exists, but its price has not meaningfully come down since companies such as Google's Waymo, or Uber, started large-scale robotic taxi testing in the US. The tech needed to create a robotic driving system that's genuinely as skilled and aware of its surroundings as even a half-decent human is mind-bogglingly expensive. [ EV Q&A: Why do electric cars still have old-fashioned 12-volt batteries? Opens in new window ] General Motors, the US' biggest car maker, pulled the plug on its Cruise robot taxi service late last year, and Renault has recently said that it sees autonomous tech as more useful for large-scale public transport systems – buses and trains – than for individual cars. Equally, adding more cars to our streets isn't going to resolve the congestion problems in our city centres. What does that leave us with? Well, we know that incentives are certainly a useful way of encouraging people to buy an electric car. Indeed, without incentives many of the EVs on the market right now would be €8,500 more expensive, and that would definitely hurt their sales. The experience of the German government, which ended incentives almost overnight and saw a subsequent plummet in new EV sales, would seem to show that incentives work. Are they a perfect solution? No, not in the slightest, but perhaps perfection is not what we should be looking for here. Any encouragement is useful, and any one person who makes the switch from combustion to electric motoring is another step on the long road to carbon neutrality. In the background, though, we need to be working on the bigger picture: on a charging network that functions properly and reliably for all users; expanding renewable energy for the grid; developing viable e-fuels and biofuels to power the existing car park of combustion engine cars; at least considering the potential for hydrogen as a power source; and creating an electricity supply set-up that's affordable at the point of use when charging. Those are the actions which will truly transform both electric car ownership and emissions from transport. Incentives are really just an early-days sticking plaster.
