Kilkenny County Council
Summary
Kilkenny is another County Council without a plan for the energy transition, but had an excellent energy savings campaign.
On-site Renewables Kilkenny County Council had no renewable energy installed on its premises to save money.
Own Investments Kilkenny had no PV or wind farms of its own to generate cash to support front line services common in English County Councils. See West Suffolk
Efficiency Plan Unlike most Irish Councils, Kilkenny had a clear grasp of its overall spending on energy, heating and transport fuels at €1,358,351.
They had a well-established energy efficiency campaign with the annualised value running to 1,878,905kWh of energy saved from non-domestic projects completed between 2013 and 2019. This gave an annualised monetary saving of €258,947.5. This is nearly 20% of its current expenditure.
Rates In terms of its rates, it had no coding in its financial systems for any of the 9 types of renewable energy except wind farms. Windfarms along with rates from the National Grid provided nearly 17% of Kilkenny’s rates. The figure is probably higher as there are issues with their finance systems.
It would appear that Kilkenny’s Management and Councillors are not aware of the potential benefits to their ratepayers from localising renewable energy which will expand six fold over the next 15 years.
If Kilkenny’s financial systems could ‘see’ the other forms of renewable energy this percentage likely be a higher proportion of rates income. See N.I. example here. It appears Kilkenny’s finance cannot properly measure how positive renewables are on its finances and there are no plans to fix the coding issues in their financial systems BUT– see Donegal Council for solution.
Kilkenny seems unaware of the amount of rates it gets from the National Grid and energy infrastructure generally. Our research shows the real figure to be €2,289,894.01 . See our research on this here Tailte centrally calculated values.
Organised Plan The Council appears to have no plans to maximise the financial benefits to itself of the energy transition. The Council seemed unaware that ‘green energy jobs’ are forecast to grow to 125,000 in the Republic by 2030 with a matching increase in rates, in many Councils likely to be the biggest portion of rates being paid by 2030.
See the breakdown summary of the Council here:
| Annual € | |
| Rates Income from Renewable Energy Projects | € 948,320 |
| Income from Council’s own renewable energy | nil |
| Cumulative annualised savings from energy savings campaign | € 248,284.80 pa |
| Savings from the electrification of Council’s vehicle fleet | nil |
| Rates Income from fossil fuel plants and gas networks | € 521,175 |
| Rates Income from grid infrastructure and related plant | € 1,768,638.54 |
| Total | € 3.49 million pa |
Council’s Reply
We are currently crafting a request for the 22/23 Financial Year aimed at investigating their preparedness for the energy transition. It will be backed by professional Legal and Accounting advice and will be far more comprehensive. We have learnt a lot from this last exercise. We will be using the European Directive on Environmental information. This mandates European public bodies to provide all environmental related information to be published to a fulsome extent, at no extra cost.
We will be going back to Kilkenny with this new template. We will be publishing both the request and the answer from Council. We will be letting the Council know that their response will be published.
A PDF of the Council’s EU Directive response will be here soon.