Ms Marie Donnelly:

We currently import all of our natural gas from Scotland. We have no storage capacity for gas. It represents a risk for security of supply that we have no storage capacity in the country. I assume that is the reason the Government decided to establish a floating LNG facility. It is called a floating facility because it is basically a ship that can be tied into a harbour. It is less expensive to buy and easier to put in place than a built facility. If we did not need gas, we would not need LNG storage. In our electricity chapter, we asked what is the dispatchable electricity supply that will be available to the country in the next decade to balance the variable renewable generation coming from wind and solar. At the moment, we are looking at natural gas. The council is asking whether we can look at alternatives, particularly bio-energy produced in the country, such as biogas coming from anaerobic digestion. In the longer term, hydrogen might be used in the turbines to produce a back-up. These are the questions we are asking with regard to balancing the policies and the expenditures in place for security of supply.