Ms Aoife MacEvilly:

That is probably one of the ways the suppliers compete. Their ability to have an effective hedging strategy, whether that is owing their own generation capacity or engaging in different types of hedging, is the way they compete. That is their competitive advantage. If we start to tell them they must do it in a particular way, it means, first, that we are saying we have a better idea than anybody else about what is happening in the market, which we do not, and second, we would eliminate one of the key competitive areas. It is interesting that while there is a major focus on hedging, because everybody is thinking about protecting against the future price, we may move to a market where there are more dynamic tariffs available.

For instance, large energy users might expose part or all of their energy consumption to the market price because they would get the benefit of the lower wind related price periods. Hedging may become less important and we may move more customers, including domestic customers, into that tariffing arrangement with some protections obviously because hedging is notoriously challenging. In fairness, however, we would not get into that space.