Ms Aoife MacEvilly:

I will not revisit the history but there was a CBA in 2010 after the initial trial. Along with industry and other key stakeholders, many of whom are around the table, we went into a high level design process to ascertain how this smart metering project would work in Ireland. We had a CBA rerun in early 2014 whereby we had a broadly neutral outcome and decided to continue to progress with the project. Since then we have been very much into detailed design and delivery. In the detailed design of the policy framework within which the smart meters would be rolled out and from the point of view of the ESB networks and the suppliers in the market, much more detailed analyses of the level of systems upgrades would be required and the mechanics of how it will work.

As Mr. Peter O'Shea mentioned, we are coming to the point where the ESB will tender to procure the communications and the smart metering and the final CBA that was mentioned is really the last gate where we have real financial information coming through from a tendering process to test our CBA and demonstrate that this is going to deliver the benefits for consumers.

I would not describe myself as happy that it has taken this long, but I accept that this is an enormously complex and challenging project with a significant level of technical requirements. The way we have designed this and the reason we have taken so much time at high level design and detailed policy design is that we want to ensure this project delivers for consumers. In some of the other examples in the European Union, where projects have been rolled out it has been very much based on system operational type requirements to help with meter reads only or to address theft issues in Italy and it did not actually deliver the full benefits to consumers. We have taken a lot of time and we have probably added some additional functionality to what we are looking for from the Irish smart metering project which has added to the complexity. It has taken longer but we hope this is getting real in terms of having the tendering information and the ability to hit the green button and go.