Mr. John McCarthy:

We would love to have had the revised wind guidelines put in place a long time ago. The 2006 guidelines remain in place. There is an energy policy and planning piece, and trying to reconcile those into a new set of guidelines has been very difficult. Deputy Stanley mentioned it earlier and, as we got to that point, a European Court of Justice judgment in either a Belgian or Dutch case was handed down, meaning we had to go through a strategic environmental assessment, SEA, process on them. The preparation of the SEA is now pretty much done and we will start the consultation on those in the next few weeks. It will be for eight weeks and we are looking to finalise the process in early 2019.

There was mention of renewable electricity but again I do not have the data on this. It may have arisen when representatives of the Department of Communications, Climate Action and Environment were before the committee. My recollection is we had made very significant progress towards the target in terms of our level of renewable electricity generation. I do not have the figures. Notwithstanding all the matters that have arisen, it is an area where there has been a fair amount of progress over the past decade.