Mr. Mark Foley:

It will unquestionably come at a higher price. At this moment, in a control room in Ballsbridge, there are people literally balancing supply and demand from wind farms as small as 10 MW right up to the large-scale generators. In the near to medium term, even with a very significant number of households going to generation and even if they could export to the grid, it is unlikely, given the amount of aggregated volume with which EirGrid has to deal, that would be very significant or disruptive for our operations. Even if hundreds of thousands of households did it the consumption at domestic level, as compared with heavy industry and commercial use, is quite modest. We do not see micro-generation presenting a problem of any significance when compared with the demand we have at the moment and with what is ahead of us in the shape of population growth and economic growth, which will require that we build renewables of a very significant scale. I understand the desire to get the consumer into the energy system but we have to get thousands of renewable megawatts into the Irish system if our trajectory is not to go backwards when we need to accelerate it.