Ms Aoife MacEvilly:

In 2012, when we considered this application, it was a new area for us. Given that the company's business case was to dry biomass and sell it into the biomass market, one of the main questions on which we focused during the economic assessment was whether we could establish that there was a biomass market, that there was a market price and that, therefore, there was an economic justification for that degree of heat output. Several years later, circumstances have changed considerably. We have a well-established framework for understanding, say, if someone is drying wood chips and selling them, what the market is. We have learned a great deal about that. The process has not changed fundamentally but we have a better framework of understanding and testing alternative cases. For example, we have better experience of knowing what an efficient alternative case is and so on, but that is just due to learning. It is the same process with the same test in respect of the legal requirement-----