Mr. Fintan Slye:

I thank the Deputy for his questions and I will go through them in the order in which they were asked. First, the Deputy asked how sure EirGrid was of the data underpinning the figures for the adoption of the regional grid option. We have done extensive analysis on this. In addition to our own analysis, we commissioned Indecon to do a review of our analysis and to look at the economy sector by sector and region by region to see whether the plans we were putting forward would meet the needs of the regions for the foreseeable future. The Deputy asked what foreseeable future means. The horizon of the foreseeable future is out to 2025 to 2030. We published the review by Indecon in March and it is available on our website. We can discuss, if the Deputy so wishes, the data and figures in the report that looked at the south east and the adequacy of the regional solution to meet the needs of the network for that period. Given where the economy is and where we see the growth in the economy, which is great to see, the make-up of the economy is very different now from what it was before the crash. Before the crash, construction made up a significant proportion of the GDP growth in the economy. I think we are all acutely aware that before the crash it accounted for more than 20% but now it is below 10%. What is driving economic growth today is very different. That in part is a reason the relationship between GDP growth and energy growth has changed. One no longer gets the close correlation we had in the years between 2000 and 2007 between GDP growth and energy growth. The make-up of the economy is different and cost competitiveness has become a significant focus for industry. Energy has become one of the areas where businesses have become acutely conscious of the need to manage their costs to ensure competitiveness. We only have to look at yesterday's announcement of the unfortunate closure of the Michelin plant in Ballymena to understand the impact of cost competitiveness on the sustainability of businesses. Businesses are much more conscious of managing energy costs.

We are seeing the new standards in housing coming through in the new housing stock, so the use of energy per unit of residential housing is not as good. For all those reasons growth rates in energy are now not as correlated with growth rates in GDP. We want to ensure any option we put forward is robust and the plans we put forward will meet the needs of society and the economy. At the end of the day, the transmission system is there to serve society and the economy and to ensure reasonable demands for electricity are met and the economy can grow. We underpinned our analysis with an analysis by Indecon which went through that in great detail and we published that as part of the draft grid development strategy in order that we would get feedback from anyone who believed we might have missed in any way anything in terms of economic growth. There was no feedback on any of it. In fact there were supportive statements from various relevant agencies around it.

The Deputy's second question was on the money spent to date. In developing the Grid Link project to the stage where it is now, with the three options developed and we are about to move forward with one option, the total expenditure to date on the project has been of the order of €12 million. This includes the development of the three options and the comparison of the three options to enable the regional option to be selected as the way to move forward.

I apologise to the Deputy if I took up his next question in the wrong way but what I have written down is whether we understood the real concerns that were raised in the submissions on the Grid Link project. There were of the order of 38,000 submissions made on the Grid Link project during the consultation period that ran from the end of 2013 into early 2014. We recognised the very real concerns in the communities. That was the very reason that in January we announced a series of five initiatives designed to address those concerns. That consultation closed in mid-January and before the end of the month we had announced a series of five specific initiatives based on a very high-level review of the themes we had seen coming through in that consultation and other consultation. We took an immediate step to try to address those because we recognised the concerns.

Those initiatives included a commitment to undertake a detailed study of the undergrounding option in the cases of Grid West and Grid Link, to review our consultation and engagement process, to put in place a community gain scheme for communities, to address in a very explicit way concerns around the tourism, agriculture and equine industries and to work with the review of electromagnetic fields which is to be undertaken by the relevant Department.

Perhaps it is worth mentioning that during 2014, we undertook an extensive review of our consultation and engagement process. We engaged two external agencies to come in to help us with that. They went out to meet stakeholders, individuals and groups that had participated in consultation. They provided us with detailed reports and feedback, all of which we published explicitly on our website. On foot of that process, in December of last year we set out a series of 12 commitments that we were making as a company in order to improve our consultation and engagement process. We are continuing to look at how we can improve that. It is fair to say that we listen to communities and try to respond. We have looked to improve the manner in which we consult and engage with communities. We are continuing to seek to do that as we go forward.

The Deputy's fourth question related to why we are not looking to put the North-South interconnector underground. He correctly referred to the last time we were in here, when we spoke about the North-South interconnector project. He pointed out that the technology to put it underground is available. I suppose the first thing to say is that the project in question is now the subject of a statutory planning process with An Bord Pleanála, to which we have made an application for consent. An Bord Pleanála has engaged in a process of statutory consultation and it is running through that process. Maybe that is the first thing to say. The second thing is that undergrounding comes at a very considerable additional cost. In 2011, the Government appointed an international expert, who reported to this committee in 2012. The expert's estimate of the additional cost was that it would represent an increase of a factor of three. We have done a detailed engineering, environmental, technical and cost assessment of a route-specific option for the North-South interconnector delivered using high-voltage direct current technology. We have identified a route, costed and assessed the feasibility of that route and determined through that detailed work that the cost of such a route would be in excess of four times the cost of the alternative option. All of that is published and available and forms part of our planning application, which has been submitted to An Bord Pleanála.