Mr. David Maguire:

Perhaps I could touch on the planning point in the first instance. There is an absence of national guidelines on planning and that is a matter of some concern. However, as an industry we believe that the planning regime is sufficiently robust to filter out any poorly sited projects. The main impact of large scale or utility scale solar energy generation is visual. There are no emissions and no moving parts. That is the key issue. To that end, and in the absence of national guidelines, we have produced our own planning recommendations and guidelines. We have sat down with senior officials from the relevant Department. We have presented our guidelines to them and are hoping for feedback. We engaged widely with An Taisce, Friends of the Earth, the EPA and various other bodies on this document. We have sent it out to local authorities. There is a statutory requirement for planning, but as an industry we have sought to raise the bar in terms of what we deem best practice and what we have seen from our experience in Europe in the past 20 years. We have sought to bring those planning practices to Ireland where they are applicable. We have done that as an industry.

With respect to what we can deliver, when we can deliver and how much it will cost, if we look at the order of merit of deploying renewables in Ireland, our wind resource is second to none in Europe, with the possible exception of Scotland. In terms of the deployment of renewable energies that should be where we look first. One of the key pillars of the Department's role is energy security, which includes having a diversity of energy generation in the mix. After onshore wind, solar is the cheapest form of renewable generation in Ireland by some margin. That is where we should go in the second instance. On the mix of those two forms of generation, because of the Irish climate when it is windy we tend to have lower light levels and when we have high light levels, we tend to have lower wind levels. The two kinds of generation are very complementary.

From that perspective, geographically we also have the east and the south east coast. The south coast is where the greatest solar resources are located. It is also where there is a lot of grid capacity available at the distribution level. Those assets - grid capacity and solar resources - are assets which wind energy cannot avail of, so again solar is a good fit there.

What can we deploy? On what we have in planning and in the grid at the moment, members will have heard numbers such as 6 GW in the grid queue and so on. We have called for a lot of that speculative grid application. With the regulator we have sought to have a group processing approach, GPA, or gate processing approach, which would filter out many projects. We want to see planning as a filter so that only the real projects come forward. Already, just looking at what will come through between now and the end of 2020, as an industry we could deliver 2 GW. We already have line of sight to 1.5 GW. In order to have a competitive auction for 1.5 GW, we need at least 2 GW ready to go with planning. What does that equate to? If we can deliver 1.5 GW by the end of 2020, what will that save us in terms of the shortfall on our 2020 targets? Approximately 1% of that target equates to 1 GW of solar energy. We could halve the potential shortfall. If we look at a total shortfall of up to approximately €420 million, we could potentially save the Exchequer more than €200 million per annum at the cost of approximately €15 million per annum on the public service obligation, PSO, levy. Solar can deploy very quickly. What is holding solar back on the grid side is the long lead-in, the switchgear and so on. The reality is that we can still deliver that much at the distribution level within the timeframe, that is by 2021.