Clare County Council

How do we know this information?

Clare refused our FoI and only partly responded to our AIE. Only 4 out of 47 Councils did this. They specifically refused to disclose rates from the Ardnacrusha Dam and Moneypoint power station – every other Council disclosed their rates for big installions like this. We are working with Tailte to see if we can get this information separately. Also see last section of this report below.

Summary

Clare like most Councils in Ireland has no plan for the energy transition.

On-site Renewables Clare County Council had no renewable energy installed on its premises to save money.

Own Investments Clare had no PV / wind farms of its own to generate cash to support front line services common in English County Councils. See West Suffolk

Efficiency Plan Surprisingly Clare claimed to be one of the few Councils in Ireland not to have an energy efficiency plan.

Nor do they have no system to record cumulative annualised savings. Even small Councils like Louth and Cavan are able to justify further money-saving investments as they are both acan demonstrate annualised savings more than €300,000pa.

Rates Out of 9 renewable energy types Clare could only identify windfarms paying rates in its area. These, along with rates from the National Grid provided only 8% of Clare’s rates. This is very low for a Western County. It is very unlikely that their senior management or finance teams are aware of this. The real figure is probably higher as there are issues with Council finance systems in the Republic which do not have ‘codes’ allowing them to ‘see’ data for most renewables.

As a result, Clare’s Management and Councillors are probably not aware of the potential benefits to their ratepayers from localising renewables given the projected six-fold expansion of rates for renewables expected over the next 15 years. See link to how N.I. councils can ‘see’ all types of renewables.

While there are no plans to fix the coding issues, see Donegal Council for solution. 

Clare did not know what the National Grid contributed in rates but we found it to be €1.6 million plus 1/2 million euro pa for fossil fuel or gas pipelines. 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 is likely unaware of the upcoming expansion of rates along with ‘green energy jobs’ forecasted to grow to 125,000 in the South and by 42,000 in the North by 2030. Energy will be the biggest percentage of most Councils rates by 2030. But only for those who plan ahead or get lucky like hapless Leitrim.

See the breakdown summary of the Council here:

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 Clare 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.