Renewable Energy Generation
Dail Éireann — 2026-04-23
============================================================

Gillian Toole (IND), Meath East

I thank the Minister of State. I always say here that every day is a school day. The €11 million PSO levy being returned is most welcome. I do not wish to be cheeky but I would welcome a response from the Minister of State on whether the transfer of leases has or does not have an impact on price? I appreciate that the Minister of State is deputising. I highlighted the average price versus the real price and the gap in the middle. I know the patterns in my area. In one instance, a farm was bought by a business person on the open market, and there was no problem there. The planning application was successful. Post-planning the parcel of land was sold on with a margin. I am not naïve in that my background is small business and margin is critically important. However, if you add a margin at various stages which, to the best of my knowledge, do not have a safeguard or control, you could end up with the retail price at the end having that factored in. For something as essential as energy, that is something that really needs to be looked into.
Again, I would draw attention to the EnergyCloud report for the 13 months where there is €550 million of spare renewable energy that would be most welcome to those 330,000-odd households which are in energy arrears.
That should be investigated. There should also be an investigation into where that differential may arise.

---

Source: Houses of the Oireachtas. Licensed under CC BY 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/). The Official Report is revised after first publication; the fetch timestamp below identifies the version quoted.

Record URI: https://data.oireachtas.ie/akn/ie/debateRecord/dail/2026-04-23/debate/main
Retrieved: 2026-08-27T06:54:48+00:00
Sitting date: 2026-04-23