Mr. Denis Duff:

There are two ways of looking at cost. The first involves the cost per megawatt or per megawatt hour. In the United Kingdom they have reached a contract price of £92.50 per megawatt hour. This equates to 9.25 pence per unit. Estimating the cost in Ireland is difficult because we are only an amateur group. From our estimations, however, the cost would depend on the level of support from the Government and the people. That support would influence the project in terms of the level of certainty with regard to it proceeding. Other issues which must be factored in are the likelihood of protests during the construction phase, whether construction would be delayed and whether there would be Government support while construction was taking place. These all impact on the cost of finance and have a knock-on effect in terms of the cost of electricity. We have estimated that if everything went really well - we do not expect that it will - we could generate energy for 5 cent per unit. If everything did not go so well, we still estimate that the cost would be 15% lower than that relating to the large reactor in the United Kingdom.

I presume members are aware that the east-west interconnector is only used to export energy supplies perhaps 2% of the time. The remainder of the time it is either idle or being used to import energy supplies. We import 50 times more energy via the interconnector than we export. If we were to change the balance to such an extent that energy would be cheaper here than in the United Kingdom, we could export energy supplies via the interconnector. Rather than Ireland being obliged to pay another €500 million, perhaps the United Kingdom will pay for the next interconnector built. We are also liable for a transmission charge and there are losses across the interconnector. Instead of taking power supplies at cost from the United Kingdom and absorbing transmission losses and the cost of the interconnector, we could be supplying that jurisdiction with energy supplies.