Mr. Fintan Slye:

If Northern Ireland built its own generating station it still would not address the bottlenecks and constraint costs between the two jurisdictions. Such an approach would perpetuate the constraint costs of €30 million per annum, increasing to €40 million a decade later. We would still have a single market with two transmission grids. If the position is adopted that each jurisdiction should build an efficient level of generation on its own, the net cost to consumers will increase because the two systems would build up capacity reserves without the ability to share them. That cost would ultimately be borne by consumers.