Mr. Conall Bolger:

I thank the Deputy for those questions. I will go back to the question regarding the delivery of infrastructure. He mentioned the North-South interconnector being crucial for operating our electricity system. That is true. Every systems study we have ever seen states that. I have been in the electricity industry for about 16 years now. When I joined, we were told the North-South interconnector was coming and how it was going to enable us to manage this system. Whatever about the rights and wrongs of it, and there are two jurisdictions, which adds further complexity, and many affected communities on the route, it points to some of the challenges. There have been other subsequent plans, such as Grid25, which was going to involve a great deal of grid development. I do not think a cable of that has been laid although there might have been some minor upgrades. There is something to be said for energy being fundamentally about infrastructure. There is no getting away from that. We want to enable people to directly participate themselves. We spent a lot of time during this session talking about that and it is crucial.

We also need larger utility scale projects that will involve the building of infrastructure. It is one of the reasons we emphasise in the plan that it is important we build the right infrastructure and do not overbuild, which some of the standards are encouraging at present. They are forcing developers to build more cable and more infrastructure than they need to, which is not very efficient. We encourage all Members to think about the level of support they could or could not give to a piece of infrastructure recognising, as with any development, it has to be done using good practice and plenty of community engagement. Clearly, something has to be done. It is the Achilles heel of our renewables programme and, ultimately, it is something we have to grapple with as a country.

The direct lines and the summer load correlation is not something I fully appreciated but it is a very interesting point. If many of the data centres could get in solar complemented with a battery system and maybe some other system, and there are some models where they could perhaps look at doing something with an anaerobic digester, such as biogas and those kinds of interactions with agriculture, we start getting to a situation where the data centre industry can meet a lot of its demand using those kinds of models. They could build that whole concept of the circular economy of outputs from agriculture becoming inputs to data centres and sustainability of energy. There are some very exciting things there.

On whether we have had talks with the data centre industry, we have probably had some engagement with it. It is fair to say that it is in a very interesting phase. The Central Statistics Office has just published statistics indicating data centre electricity demand is now greater than that of rural electricity users so this is not a problem that is going away. There is a real opportunity for us to show a little leadership and have the most sustainable data centres in the world. It is something we can do, if we are prepared to grasp it and enable it. If direct line is something that helps get us there, it seems a relatively straightforward fix in order to move us on.

On the 6 GW solar question, we estimate that will be approximately 20% of our total power demand in 2030. When we start layering the average wind profile, it is very interesting that the hours of the day when wind and solar tend to generate are different. If we put the two of them together, we start getting to the point where we are getting closer and closer to 100% renewables. Our challenge then becomes, in essence, how to manage the periods where we do not have enough and the periods where we have too much. That builds into the need for a flexibility strategy for Ireland, including demand response, storage, batteries and, in the longer term, pieces such as hydrogen and so forth. It is about that integrated system. That is how we will get to the full decarbonised system.

I will hand over the question on land use for other purposes, but I note a scheme is in place to recycle the solar equipment at the end of its life, and a common part of the planning permission for those projects is they have to put money aside to restore the land to the situation-----