Mr. Cathal Marley:

I will give an initial response and then pass over to Ms O'Shea. On the transmission side, we take the electricity from the generators. There has been a massive transformation there. That used to be very stable. It used to come from particular conventional generating stations, but now it comes from renewables, including solar, onshore wind and, we hope, offshore wind. That is our job. There is huge change happening. It is coming at different frequencies and voltages, so there are lots of technical things happening. We have to manage the grid to be able to take that power onto the system.

Electricity also comes from different places now. The grid was designed and built around traditional conventional plants. We had a good idea where they were going to be located. As the electricity is now coming from different places the grid has to be expanded to be allowed to move that. When we talk about dispatch down that is one of the issues. If wind is being generated in one place and the grid is not there to transport it to another place where there is demand that is a challenge, so we have to build that out.

The other aspect is the way the demand is located and operated is shifting. We are electrifying society with heat pumps and electric vehicles, EVs, and we have data centres. All that is changing and changes what we need to do with the infrastructure. Then there is economic growth generally. It needs a bigger infrastructure. It was designed for a certain level of society, the investment maybe was not put in as quickly as it needed to be over the past ten, 15 or more years, and now we are trying to do a catch-up on that. That is why it is more expensive.