Professor Brian Ó Gallachóir:

It highlights the challenges in this space. If we want to remove carbon from our economies, there are very significant challenges. There are challenges associated with any of the technology options. We do not promote one over the other. There might be a misconception of what our analysis does. What we try to do is feed in agnostically the costs associated with different technologies, how they are projected to develop or evolve over time and see how we can meet the climate ambition at least cost.

As mentioned, we have also carried out an analysis where we rule out certain things given that many things can be ruled out. We do not promote certain things but, instead, we do experiments. The question of CCS came up earlier. We have run scenarios where we assume CCS will not be developed and others where we assume we cannot import any bioenergy. Two things happen when we do that. First, the solutions become more difficult because we have fewer options to choose from and, second, they become more costly. It is not just an energy poverty issue and there is a range of social and economic inequalities. However, we do not want solutions that veer away from least-cost unless there is a very good reason to do that.