Mr. Garrett Blaney:

We will try our best. Many of the questions that were asked are inter-related. This is where the complexity alluded to by Deputy Colreavy comes into play. All of these things interact with one another. The first question asked by Deputy Mulherin goes to the heart of the issue. Why are our prices now cheaper than they were a couple of years ago? A number of major changes have taken place across the energy sector globally and particularly in Europe. The move to renewables has been a key factor in that. We need to look at current prices in the context of the sort of revolution that has gone on across Europe. Germany is probably the country that stands out the most. Considerable costs have been put into renewable delivery across Europe. Ireland's wind resource means that the onshore wind technology available in Ireland is probably one of the cheapest technologies available anywhere in Europe. That has started to drive our prices relative to the other prices. If one looks at the graph of the countries, one will see that countries like Germany, Spain and Italy, which spent a great deal of money on expensive technologies at an early stage, are at a slightly higher level of renewable penetration than Ireland, which has been able to deliver it at a much cheaper price by focusing on least-cost delivery of renewables in the form of onshore wind. This is one of the reasons our prices have come down. We are not the most expensive country in the way that we were.

A feature of the market is that high gas prices tend to be much more profitable for the generators. There is a built-in extra cost to consumers when gas prices are high rather than low. We are benefitting from lower gas prices. As Ms MacEvilly was saying, we are trying to look at changing the way we have designed the wholesale market. This is a European requirement. Currently, the market does not comply fully with EU energy union requirements. As part of that, we will seek to put a more flexible system in place as more renewables come in. Wind has been least-cost in the past, but that does not necessarily mean it will be least-cost in the future. More and more wind on the system adds extra costs. It is a question of the law of diminishing returns. To bring in more and more wind, we have extra network costs. We need more flexibility from the generators. The wind does not always blow. When the wind is not blowing, we need to have extra capacity there to keep the lights on. The cost of that increases with the levels of wind. Some of the microgeneration technologies, such as solar technology, start to become more competitive in such circumstances. They also have falling capital costs. We constantly need to look at this in a cost framework. While we have security of supply requirements and we need to consider the environment, cost is a major feature of our overall duty.