Mr. Peter O'Shea:

The second question was about electric vehicles. I will have to come back to the committee with the numbers as I do not have them with me. We see EVs as being very important as we move into the future. In our new office that we are building on Fitzwilliam Street, for example, there will be only 50 car parking spaces and each will be EV-proofed from day one in 2021. I will come back to the committee with the actual numbers. One of the constraints we face is that many of our vehicles are heavy vehicles. The electrification of vehicles is currently focused on smaller and medium-sized vehicles while the trucks we need to carry equipment out to network locations are less amenable to electrification at the moment.

In response to an earlier comment by Deputy Jack Chambers, there are two big trends when it comes to the battery technology used for vehicle electrification. The first is that the energy density of batteries is moving in an upward direction and the second is that the cost of those batteries is moving in a downward direction. It is the coming together of those two trends that makes us believe the electrification of transport is definitely the future. The electrification of vans and lorries will come into range once these trends are sufficiently strong and this will allow the ESB and other companies with large numbers of such vehicles to move our fleets onto electric vehicles.