What a way to start the new year: when the bells rang in on 1 January Ireland and the UK breached a legally binding EU requirement to set minimum levels of renewable energy in building regulations for new builds and major renovations - including dwellings and non-domestic buildings in both cases.

One of our sources in DCENR informs us that the department is set to go to consultation "within a month or so" on a new renewable energy feed in tariff scheme - including microgenerators - and, separately, a renewable heat incentive scheme.

As recently revealed on this website, the CEO of the Sustainable Energy Authority of Ireland, Dr Brian Motherway, has explained that buildings don't need to achieve particular results in the Deap software (Ireland's equivalent to SAP) to demonstate compliance with Part L.

The Irish Green Building Council is developing its Home Quality Rating tool -  a sort of Irish version of the Code for Sustainable Homes, albeit with measures in place to hopefully ensure that it's less about box ticking and more about producing buildings which actually function properly -  and is seeking to engage discretely with the industry for feedback. 

We've been working quietly away on this for a while - and I have been co-opted onto the board of the Passive House Association of Ireland, principally to work on this - but I'm excited to say that Dún Laoghaire-Rathdown County Council passed a motion this evening to make the passive house standard (or equivalent) mandatory for all new buildings in the county from 2016 onwards. UK clients, please don't feel like we're neglecting you. We are pottering away on a proposal for your market too, though the formidable obstacle that is the right honourable Eric Pickles means we have to tackle public buildings only, thanks to an entirely retrograde conclusion of his housing standards review.

Apologies for the dead air on the still nascent Inside Track recently. A trip to Australia followed by a home and office move have proven more than a little distracting, but prepare for more updates imminently, starting with a couple of pertinent pieces from the recent past.

Setting ambitious building regulations, as Ireland has arguably done with 2011 Part L, is all well and good. But is the industry actually achieving compliance with the regulations? And if so (or if not), how are those buildings actually performing, in terms of the likes of energy usage and indoor air quality? I put some questions to the Dept of the Environment press office just after Christmas, and the response leaves a lot to be desired.