Mr. Fintan Slye:

I wish to reiterate that the Grid West project is on hold pending clarification on what is happening around a number of wind farms currently in the planning process. There is a technical alternative to overhead on the North-South interconnector which is the deployment of high voltage direct current, HVDC, technology. This involves a convertor station at each end and a cable between the two converter stations. This is technically not as good a solution because one is inserting a new technology into the middle of a mesh AC network and it requires very complex control systems to manage it which have a risk of failure. It also does not facilitate economic development along the route in the same way an overhead line does. We spoke earlier about some large companies tapping into the existing transmission network which is possible with an overhead transmission network. The scale of costs involved with an underground HVDC are so prohibitive that no industrial customer would do it, which is another reason it is not a good solution.

However, HVDC is a technical alternative and we have set out the costs associated with that technology, which are very significant. Based on the facts that it is not technically as viable and that it would cost customers considerably more, we believe it is appropriate to proceed with an overhead line option and have put that to planning and we have set out the alternatives within that.