Consultancy Services to prepare Regional Renewable Energy Strategies for the Eastern and Midlands Regional Assembly, Northern and Western Regional Assembly and Southern Regional Assembly.

The three Regional Assemblies are seeking to appoint suitably qualified and experienced consultants to prepare: A report for each of the three Regions to establish and allocate local authority on-shore wind energy and solar energy targets. This report will be underpinned by a comprehensive geospatial and environmental analysis to help establish viable renewable energy targets for local authorities. The consultant will engage with relevant infrastructure stakeholders (namely EirGrid and ESB Networks) to identify grid capacity, constraints and any planned infrastructure projects.

The consultant will take account of energy security needs for the Regions in order to meet regional (and national) targets for constituent local authorities in each Region, achieve compliance with all statutory requirements in legislation. Each report will be a bespoke document specific to each Regional Assembly territory based on an agreed methodology (further detail in the next paragraph). The consultants should co-ordinate and manage the overall process in conjunction with key staff from each Regional Assembly.

The agreed methodology as appended provides for the identification of targets in the preparation of the RRES and has been developed by DCEE and SEAI in conjunction with the three Regional Assemblies. This methodology shall form the basis for undertaking the task. The Methodology is available as part of this RFT.

The development of the RRES must integrate and align with the statutory environmental assessments being undertaken as part of the RSES process. The technical outputs from the RRES must fully align with, and directly feed into the statutory environmental processes being undertaken by the individual Regional Assemblies. This includes feeding into and aligning with the Strategic Environmental Assessments (SEA), Appropriate Assessments (AA), and Regional Flood Risk Assessments (RFRA) currently being prepared by the Regional Assemblies.