Mr. John Mullins:

I might add a couple of points. I thank the Deputy for his comments, which are greatly appreciated. On foot of Ms McDonnell's stories, we hope to have many more Sharons across the country benefitting from a fully automated, technical solution. At the moment what we have is a nominated solution. When a constraint is called by Eirgrid, we then have a trigger that states that the nominated persons, or tenants, are going to receive a credit for hot water. That is exactly how it works now. Clearly we need all of the agencies involved in the technical solution we are working on and thankfully, as I said already, ESB and Eirgrid are very much involved. We have the capability to be able to get an automated signal which says we are constraining wind power. A signal can be sent through a smart meter or an automated, app-enabled immersion controller. I would point out that 77% of Irish households have immersions. That signal would automatically switch in the tank and that is automatically 3 kW. Just to give a flavour of this, if we had 100,000 households switching in at the same time, that would actually save us 300 MW of discarded wind and solar energy.