Mr. Rory Somers:

I might take that question. Regarding smart technologies and digitisation, the Deputy will be aware that there are 750,000 smart meters. We believe that smart meters are a key enabling infrastructure to allow for the digitisation of the energy transition. In the first instance, they provide people with quick information on their own energy consumption. That allows them to make behavioural change to reduce their energy consumption and to get the benefit of that through their bills. That is just a pricing behavioural change. They can then move their consumption patterns and change their consumption equipment to use less energy and be more energy efficient by moving off peak, which brings a benefit to the overall grid. They can be incentivised to do that. The way that incentive works is that the time-of-use and volume-of-use change of behaviour is recompensed from their energy supplier through lower off-peak tariffs and also specifically through load-shifting demand-response services that they can offer into the market.

From a renewable generation perspective, we are obviously talking about people not only consuming electricity and electrifying the consumption of energy by moving from fossil fuel heating systems to heat pumps and from fossil fuel combustion engine cars to electrified mobility but also about generation. When they become prosumers, they are generating their own electricity for their own self-consumption and they can then sell that electricity on the grid. On 15 February the Minister signed the regulations which transpose those articles of the recast renewable energy directive that allow and provide an obligation for suppliers to remunerate those prosumers for any electricity they export to the grid at the market value for that electricity.

Given that the market value is quite high at the moment, it might seem a glib statement but the one upside to high wholesale energy prices is that those people who are selling electricity onto the grid are getting considerably more for it today - and will get paid for it by the beginning of July onwards - than they would have done 12 months ago. That makes the business case for investing in renewable technology so much better. By self-consuming, people are avoiding the cost of the retail price of electricity for consumers. They can then get additional remuneration to pay back the investment by exporting the electricity they cannot consume themselves, the residual, and get paid at the market value of that electricity.