Policy and Infrastructure to Support Green Business.
The following is an interview held in September 2009 between Simon Coveney, T.D., of Fine Gael and Mike Collins of
The Coaching Partnership.
Mike Collins: "We saw the report you brought out earlier this year - a recommended infrastructure to support electric vehicles. For the Green Entrepreneurs conference, we were very interested in the fact that you put so much time into that report."
Simon Coveney: "I was very much the driver behind that. I have been a little disappointed by the reponse from government on it. We now have a memorandum of understanding, as a country, with Nissan to provide electric cars in 2012. The ESB has agreed with government to provide 1500 charging points as a pilot project. But, that is really the wrong scale."
"The whole thing about electric vehicles is that - unless you have scale - nobody is able to afford them. Unless you make electric cars powerful enough, comfortable enough and big enough - you are wasting your time in my view. There will always be a niche area - but what Ireland needs to do is what Israel is doing. To make a strategic decision that we are going to move away from a reliance on carbon-based fuels in the transport sector. And we are going to do that through electricity."
MC: "Stepping back a bit Simon, what was it that attracted you to get involved in the Electric Vehicle report at the time?"
SC: "It was one article - written in a techie magazine - about the "better Place" programme and a guy called Shai Agassi. I thought it was remarkable thinking - the fact that you would move whole countries away from a reliance on carbon-based fuels, and in particular - oil."
"Although there were some flaws in the Better Place model - the ambition and the thinking were so suited for Ireland - because we are an island. We can make the modal shift in transport, By comparison, France can't do it in isolation because there is so much traffic coming over the borders. In Ireland, very few cars actually leave the island."
"So, it is possible to put a roadmap into place to say nobody will be buying anything but electric cars after 2020. In the meantime let's have 20% of our cars electric by 2020. The only way to get there is to build an infrastructure that the cars can feed into."
MC: "And who would pay for this infrastructure?
SC: "That would be, in my view, the private sector. Take a company like A Better Place. If you give them a contract to put the infrastructure into place, they would happily do it. And there lots of other potential infrastructure models as well. The government should be looking for expressions of interest in supporting Ireland to make a dramatic shift, over a short period of time, to electric transport."
"There also need to be consumer incentives in place so that electric vehicles can be bought at a comparable price to internal combustion vehicles. If we expect people shift over to electric transport to save the environment, then we are being very naive. The reason why people will move to electric vehicles is that it will cost about a quarter of a combustion engine over a year."
"So, overall - we need to seek tenders for a national rollout for electric vehicles. Not just a pilot project. Make this a worldwide news story. Make Ireland a place where people want to come to test their new technologies. Companies like Mercedes and BMW would want to come here to test efficiencies and improve battery life. Ireland then goes right to the centre of the electric car industry. We need some big thinking in this area."
MC: "If the magic wand were waved, and you were transported into the Minister of Energy hot seat - what would be your priorities?
SC: "I can give you a very accurate picture. We've put together a policy document for energy - it's called "New Era". We've concentrated on broadband, electricity infrastructure and water infrastructure. They are the three pillars of the policy."
"So, I'd look at the tools that the government has at it's disposal for delivering on big thinking projects. The biggest tool by far is our semi-state portfolio of companies. The ESB, Bord Gais, Coillte and so on. There are some we don't need anymore and need to be sold. And we need to create new companies financed by those sales."
"We need to develop our portfolio of state companies so that they work strategically together - in the same way as Richard Branson runs Virgin as a portfolio for the shareholders. In our case, the shareholder is the taxpayer."
MC: "That sounds like massive restructuring."
SC: "Absolutely! But we need massive restructuring in Ireland. We have an economy in trouble, we have semi-state companys that are not delivering. We have the most expensive electricity in Europe. And we are not making the radical shift to renewables that we are talking about. This idea that we will have 40% of our electricity from renewable by 2020 is absolute fantasy unless we can rollout our grid twice as quickly as we are a the moment."
"I think the aspirations are right, but I don't think the plan is there."
MC: "What happens if we don't change?"
SC: "Ireland will become uncompetitive. People will stop investing. The infrastructure will be too expensive, a lot of the good people will leave. Unless we can say to people that we have a plan, and show them, that the cost for doing business in Ireland is going to reduce - they just won't come here."
MC: "So - at the conference coming up, we will have all sorts of small business owners. They will be looking for opportunities over the next 2 - 5 years. What will you say to them?"
SC: "Let's take the Electric Car example. If we develop an electric car infrastructure in Ireland. There are huge opportunities for small business in Ireland. For example, developing software for smart charging and all sorts of other design, build and maintenance opportunities. If you you have to put in 20.000 charging points from Skibbereen to Glenties, it is a massive construction project. It isn't going to be done by just one contractor."
"Every shopping centre is going to want to put in charging points on one of the floors. Every household is going to want an engineer to set up charging at home. This is a very labour-intensive contract. Likewise with our water infrastructure - water meters in every household."
"That's the business opportunity. Someone has got to build the charging infrastructure. Someones got to build the tanks to collect water. Someones got to build the 3000 wind turbines we need before 2020."
"If the state puts the infrastructure into place, the private sector will do the rest.
MC: "Looking into the future, what is the timeframe for making all of this happen.
SC:"What we are saying is that in government - we will spend the first 100 days putting the new structures into place. Changing the semi-state structures to make the best strategic decision."
"We need to start thinking strategically again - what does the Irish economy need - and how do we deliver it with the tools available to us. And the place to start is by considering what we already own."
"Making all of the infrastructure components happen - will take a decade."
MC: "Thank you for your time, Simon."
