Dr. John Curtis:

On the benefits of the gas system, the climate action plan possibly includes a measure about no new gas or oil boilers in new houses. Considering Gas Networks has 600,000 households on its network, if one wants all those households to install heat pumps, one has to get 600,000 decisions of individual households to upgrade. However, if one can switch the natural gas over to biogas, although we may not have the capacity for 100% substitution for natural gas, it is essentially a corporate decision by Ireland Inc to produce more biogas and put it into the network. One does not need to have all those 600,000 households make that active decision and put their hand in their pocket. If it were entirely biogas, it would produce zero emissions but it is too ambitious at this stage to talk about that. We have not the capacity in terms of waste, anaerobic digestion and all the feed stocks to go to 100% biogas in the future but there is an opportunity in that regard. In the case of households, we have spoken here about such matters as EVs and retrofits and so on. It is individual households that must make all these changes together. There are many such decisions. The number of individual decisions is up in the millions. That is one where one can hopefully make a corporate decision that might get rid of several hundred thousand individual decisions by households.