The Government has announced details of its Climate Action Plan (CAP) 2023, which aims, among a range of other climate change mitigation measures, to see one third of all private cars on Irish roads be fully electric by 2030.
The plans to electrify Ireland's national vehicle fleet form part of an overall strategy to reduce the country's transport emissions by some 50 per cent by the end of the decade.
Other aspects of the plan to reduce transport emissions include an expansion of rural bus services to ensure that 70 per cent of people in rural areas have access to buses that travel to the nearest town at least three times a day.
Active travel infrastructure to reduce car-dependency
The expansion of bus services will, according to the Government, go hand in hand with the development of new cycling and walking infrastructure with the goal of walking, cycling and public transport trips accounting for half of all journeys in Ireland by 2030. Furthering that aim will be the provision of 500 'Safe Routes to School' schemes and the rollout of over 1,000km in active travel infrastructure by 2025.
The Minister for Transport, Eamon Ryan, described the area of transport as probably "the most challenging" but said that Ireland must pivot away from total car dependency and towards sustainable mobile transport systems. This, he said, will avoid the need for unnecessary transport, which is the first step in the right direction.
The Climate Action Plan 2023 aims to reduce by 20 per cent the number of kilometres travelled by car by 2030 leading to a claimed 50 per cent reduction in overall fuel consumption and a consequent 130 per cent increase in the number of journeys undertaken by public transport.
Transport sector "unfit" to reduce emissions as is
The latest CAP takes on board some of the recommendations of a recent report published by the Office of Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) and Ireland's Climate Change Advisory Council, which highlighted Ireland's status as the most car-dependant country in the EU and branded the country's entire transport system as "unfit to enable the country to meet its greenhouse gas reduction goals while improving well-being."
"Aiming at decarbonising the system via private vehicle improvements," the report said, "is unlikely to lead to substantially different patterns of behaviour, rapid emissions reductions and large well-being improvements."
E10 petrol coming
Despite a more fundamental shift in Ireland's entire transport system being required, the Climate Action Plan 2023 does mention a range of measures aimed at enabling the national vehicle fleet to at least play some part in reducing overall transport sector emissions.
Among these are the introduction of legislation to regulate for higher biofuel blends in petrol and diesel by 2025, which likely means the transition to E10 petrol and B12 diesel in the next year or two. The UK made that same switch in 2021.
EV ambitions
By 2025, the government is targeting 175,000 electric passenger cars on Irish roads, 20,000 commercial vans, 700 low-emissions lorries and 300 electric buses. By 2030, the target is for 845,000 private EVs on the road in Ireland as well as 95,000 commercial electric vehicles, 3,500 electric lorries and 1,500 electric buses.
Though still hugely ambitious, these plans represent a small scaling-back of the government's wildly optimistic target of 936,000 private EVs set out in the 2021 Climate Action Plan and are now in line with the predictions of the Society of the Irish Motor Industry (SIMI). The new Climate Action Plan, however, remains short of specifics on how the Government plans to stimulate that transition towards EVs and it appears, for now, to be largely leaving it up to the market. There has been no talk of a new scrappage scheme, for example.