Ms Aoife MacEvilly:

I will answer briefly and then hand over. First of all, we are absolutely focused on our core mission of protecting the public interest in water, energy and energy safety. Our commitment to climate action is core to our strategic plan. It is one of our four key priorities, along with security of supply, protecting and empowering customers and, indeed, developing our own organisation.

We are not looking at doing more of the same. Most of what we have talked about today is about how we bring some of these very new technologies into play. We talked about demand-side storage and new infrastructure, which will all deliver a very different, low-carbon energy system and future for the next generations. We are prioritising that work. In response to Deputy Whitmore’s question, we outlined some of the areas that we think should be prioritised at the moment. We absolutely believe, and have stated every time we come before this committee, that a green hydrogen strategy for Ireland would be not just useful, but essential at this point.

In general, on the question of public versus private infrastructure, we have a long-standing commitment in Ireland to State ownership of energy network infrastructure, which we believe supports sustained investment within that infrastructure. However, potential competition can deliver solutions to the problems we face at least cost through innovation.

We have seen that happen through auctions where instead of saying we want a certain number of generators located in certain locations, we can say "help us solve this problem of capacity or system services" and industry can come forward with least-cost solutions. We believe this can be equally assigned through incentives around transition in the gas sector as well. I might hand over to others to address some of the questions.