Dr. Liam Ryan:

We talked about how we need 1.4 GW of battery storage coming in. We are looking at where they can be placed. One of the key areas in regard to Shaping Our Electricity Future is that we need to move towards a more plan-led approach in which demand is collocated with renewable generation. One of the challenges we face is that a significant potential of our renewables is in the west of Ireland, however, most of our demand is on the east coast. The communities in the midlands sometimes struggle with the infrastructure coming across the midlands. In essence, we need to look at how we can collocate the generation and demand so that the communities are benefiting from the renewable sources in their areas and having the demand customers connecting in those locations as well. That will help in regard to the amount of infrastructure we need to build.

As part of Shaping Our Electricity Future, we looked at a number of different options at the time. We engage widely with the communities in how we achieve the optimum solution. The final publication, as Mr. Foley said earlier, which we publish in November, called for the 70%. As we move to 80%, we will definitely need to include the technologies. We will be including demand-side participation, as we did in the last version of Shaping Our Electricity Future, and consider what we need to do around it. Key to this is that the economic signals need to be modified and the markets need to change so we can get the full potential in the next period of time.

If I may make one further point, which is that the 75% Mr. Smith referred to is world leading.

Nobody else is currently operating a power system where 75% of their instantaneous electricity comes from non-synchronous sources. Even with the 55% target in Europe, non-synchronous generation will probably be approximately 35% to 40% in the 2030 time horizon. The work we are doing here is very much pushing the boundaries. That means we will have those curtailments until we are able to move that out to 95% which we will be doing in the coming period.