Mr. Paul Allen:

It was not massive. We wanted to show it would work on a stand-alone basis. If we can show that, then sharing energy is an option. There is room for lots more modelling. There is nowhere near enough modelling being done around 100% renewables for the UK or for Ireland. There are big potentials which need to be explored.

I very much enjoyed the company of David MacKay. He regularly presented to our students at CAT, the Centre for Alternative Technology. At one point he said if we were going to do what we were suggesting, then we would need to cover the entire area of Wales with wind turbines. I then asked about an equivalent area out at sea to which he agreed. It is a large area but it does not have to be all onshore as offshore has a lot less visual impact. One wants to get social licence for that. The core to it is community ownership. When people see a wind turbine putting money into the local economy, that changes how they see it. That leads into the sort of research in the report, Who Owns the Wind? It is interesting how ownership can actually help how contracts for maintenance are deployed in the local community, as well as how the sourcing of the equipment and the labour can put money into the local economy.

To respond to Deputy Stanley's questions, baseload is a dead concept. It is a static amount of energy which one cannot change. What one really needs is flexible backup. That is the problem with nuclear. One cannot turn it off. It is useless when one has a big peak. Biogas has enormous potential. However, there are two types of gas storage. One is the biogas which is produced from natural systems. The other is the carbon dioxide captured by natural systems to upgrade the hydrogen. We have both of these working together in the scenario.

It is community ownership which creates the social licence for that. There is enormous potential for that to be integrated with a zero-carbon agricultural strategy for Ireland.