Mr. Conall Bolger:

With solar, what you get is a predictable power source. It tracks the hours in a day so you know when it is going to come on, peak and go away. International experience shows that the level of error on the forecast is less than 1% so we know what is going to do. Obviously, you get different seasons so in winter, the peak tends to be a bit lower and the days a bit shorter. It is still producing power. In summer, the days are longer and the peak is a bit higher. We are the beneficiaries of our weather. The wind and the solar resources are inversely correlated or to put it another way, the wind tends to blow when the sun does not shine and vice versa. What that means is that when you layer those two together at scale, you start getting more hours of the day where green energy is coming. We have a lot of wind. What we really need to do is start scaling up our solar power to complement it.

Regarding what you find when you do that, Afree Management Consulting undertook to compile a report for us. It found that the annual bill savings to customers would be €106 million per annum in the 2030s spread across the Irish population. Because it is coming on in the middle of the day and has that peaking shape, it is also knocking off some of the less efficient power stations. What this means is that you are getting more emissions reduction than you might otherwise have had. No one technology by itself will fix anything at a system level. It is about having the right blend of them working together to take the carbon out of our power system if that makes sense.