Eamon Ryan (Dublin Bay South, Green Party) | Oireachtas source

-----those T-4 auction schemes. These would involve solar farms, battery storage centres or backup fossil fuel generators. Those bids would have been made almost a year ago. I cannot remember the exact date. There has been a significant increase in inflation in the interim, particularly affecting the cost of energy infrastructure. Therefore, there is a specific issue in this regard that the CRU and other bodies will have to address. The emergency purchase of power equipment is slightly different because the contracts have not been concluded. As I said, we hope that they will be concluded within the next week or two. Therefore, the price set will be right up to date.

In this process, we could not go out front and say what we thought the assets would cost. When negotiating on the purchase of assets, one does not name one's expected price. However, we expect that the likely contract price, subject to contracts being signed in the coming days or two weeks, will be along the lines of what we had budgeted for internally. The Estimate today reflects that, in that we are pretty much using the exact amount we expected back in July, in the summer.