Mr. Jim Gannon:

I will be brief then. As for the present opportunities with ground-mounted offshore wind turbines, which have fixed foundations on the ground, the technology that is developing quite swiftly is floating technology. Many of the floating wind farm developers would look at aligning that with hydrogen generation and green hydrogen generation because the technology pathways and the cost curves appear to line up at about the same time. In Ireland I think we will very quickly come to a point in time when we will have sufficient offshore assets that we will need to export electrons and we will have the ability to store at scale. The question will be whether we export only as electrons through electric cables or whether we also seek to export through molecules, whether hydrogen or ammonia as a derivative of hydrogen. We need to ask ourselves the same question about domestic storage in the longer term. Will that be through electrons of different types - well, storage using electrons - or will it be through hydrogen also? There are therefore two tracks. One is the present opportunity, and we really need to access that opportunity in the short term, and the second is that longer-term possibility whereby we just use different molecules from the ones we use today.

We are jealously regarded by our European peers in respect of the scale of resource we have accessible to us, but we need to access that resource and we need to recognise that we are a long way away from the markets that might ultimately use that resource. The question is how to get the resource there cost-effectively in order that we turn a natural resource into a source of national wealth for Ireland.