Dr. Meabh Gallagher:

The market has seen a successful deployment of the shorter duration storage to date but it is the longer duration eight-hour battery storage where we would see an issue or have concerns. In EirGrid's analysis for the climate action plan, it has pointed to a need for significant long-duration storage in the second carbon budget period from 2025 to 2030. I suppose the council's concern would be that that will be delivered on time and be in place to back-up the renewables on the system at that point. I suppose that is where the council has pointed to concerns around delays of some of the enabling policies there - the storage framework that was due in quarter 3 and the regulatory review of storage that is due by the end of this year.

In general, there are a number of market barriers for that long duration storage to interact with the market at present from the system service market, the energy market and the capacity market and there is a good deal of enabling policy and regulation that will need to come in time to deliver this longer duration storage from 2025. If there is a planning element to that, it makes it a very short timeframe between now and then. In the context of data centres, the shorter duration storage that we have available at present is not necessarily the most suitable for data centres for back-up generation if they have an outage for a longer period of time and it is that long-duration eight-hour storage that they would require.