Ms Aoife MacEvilly:

I am happy to take that. It is like the difference between when new housing is brought on to the network. We have really good standards now for housing. A lot of new houses have heat pumps and solar. It is easier to add that when one is building and it is much harder to retrofit. We have an opportunity for the new ones connecting to bring them on in a way that really supports our goals, and we know it is going to be harder to work with the ones that are there and already have a footprint, where they cannot necessarily as easily add some of the options we are consulting on. That is why the connection policy focuses on new connections.

There is another strand to the demand strategy that is looking at how we can get existing users of all scales on the network, from domestics to small and large businesses, including data centres, to participate in flexibility markets and provide demand-side response. We are targeting them as well through that other strand of the policy. There is such an opportunity here. We should not be signing more data centres without getting them to be as close to carbon neutral and to our shared goals as we possibly can.