Mr. Jim Gannon:

I will try not to cover ground that the transmission system operator has already covered. With regard to demand side units, even at the start of September we saw a significantly tight period. At that point, wind was giving us very low electricity. Demand side units were asked to become active and they did. They can respond and they can make a material difference there. On the single electricity market committee, we work together with our colleagues from the Northern Ireland utilities regulator on the wholesale market. We had a consultation run during the summer months to explore how we could bring more demand side units to the table and incentivise them such that they are made more available. This is particularly focused at those peak points in time.

That does not quite respond to the question from Deputy Higgins around the longer-term demand profiling, admittedly, but a written response from EirGrid in the first instance would be well worth considering.

On the question of our response to data centres, there has been a policy in place for a couple of years on data centre connections. In recent times we had a subsequent consultation to see if more were needed, given EirGrid's more long-term modelling. It was in the form of a proposed decision, which had a number of options. One was a blanket moratorium, which is a tool that remains open to regulators if required at any point. The preferred option was to explore with the data centre community the choices to sufficiently mitigate the challenge they pose to us through a range of different technologies, restrictions or even opportunities that could be afforded to that community. It is notable we had over 50 responses to that consultation and we expect to come to a final decision in the next four to five weeks. We would be very happy to forward that to the committee on its publication and have subsequent dialogue on it.

There is a mixed perspective in the data centre community; some of them find it more difficult to be more flexible in their demand or approach and some are quite ambitious and are seeking to look at the long term, recognising Ireland's opportunity and the foundation that a highly renewable system has already given them to support their electricity supply generation goals and differentiate themselves from their competitors. Some of these businesses are looking at the sort of long-term battery storage that could take advantage of excess wind at those points in time and use it when needed. Separately, they also want to look at on-site generation not only with regard to the use of natural gas in the short term but some are explicitly looking at the transition from that generation to hydrogen in the medium to long term. We find that some really have that long-term perspective and ambition for decarbonisation that they bring with demand. It is a mixed bag.