Mr. Nicholas Tarrant:

On the first point regarding planning, we plan on a five-year cycle based on our price review process. We produce a business plan, take input from stakeholders as part of that plan and we publish it, as we did last November. We also published an approach document early in the summer last year to get inputs from various stakeholders. We then engage with the various Government Departments, including meeting the Department of housing, which we met last September in advance of submitting our plan. That was around the time that discussions were ongoing around the change to the targets that were upcoming.

If we look at where the electricity network is now, we published the distribution capacity pathways report following a detailed study of where we are and the plans for the future at the end of 2023. It looks at the distribution network and takes all the inputs in light of issues like the climate action plan and the growth of industrial and commercial expected loads, again linked to the transformation of economic growth and also housing. At the time we produced that report, we were operating on the basis of 30,000 houses per annum. When we put forward our plan for the price review coming up, we put in a large number of distribution substations that will add significant capacity to our network. Once we have those built, we will have significant additional capacity that supports housing and other needs. Between now and then, similar to the points made by Uisce Éireann, interim projects will be needed to address capacity during that period.

Specifically on the area of north Dublin, it has seen concentrated development across a range of sectors, and there are challenges in the electricity network there that we are working through. One of the differences between the ESB and Uisce Éireann is that we work closely with Eirgrid, which is the transmission system operator. We rely on Eirgrid providing transmission capacity for us that flows down into the distribution network.