Ms Catherine Joyce-O'Caollai:

I will talk a little bit about some of the benefits of hydrogen and the legal and regulatory basis that underpins it. The European Commission was very clear when it published REPowerEU. It put in place firm targets for the use of hydrogen across the EU by 2030 – 10 million tonnes produced indigenously within Europe by 2030 and importing 10 million tonnes. The reason it did that was because it realised it could not meet net zero in the absence of a zero-carbon fuel like hydrogen. Around 2017 or 2018, we saw it starting to amend the legislation that gives effect to renewable technologies because it realised net zero could not be reached in its absence.

With respect to criticisms of hydrogen, if one looks at the benefits of it, when it is produced, it is storing electricity from intermittent sources of renewables. There were six weeks in 2020 or 2021 where there was very little wind, not only in Ireland but across northern Europe. Hydrogen allows you to mitigate against those types of scenarios. Looking at storage data - I think it was data from 2019 and I will not labour on the figures too much - it showed that we had 60 days of energy stored in fossil fuels across Ireland. As we move away from fossil fuels, we also lose that storage. If we are to remain within our carbon budgets and meet our statutory obligations under national law to reduce carbon emissions, we do not really have a choice but to go for hydrogen. With respect to its storage, there are studies being undertaken across the EU of transitioning existing gas storage to the storage of hydrogen.