Mr. Dara Lynott:

I will take the last question first. I will ask Mr. Douglas to deal with the stranded assets or what we would call the forced exit from or entry into the system and how the market design tries to minimise stranded assets or at least unexpected exits from the market.

The difficult thing about electricity as opposed to oil or gas is that one cannot store it or can store only very little of it. It has to be used pretty much instantaneously. Therefore the nearest one could come to what one could call a security of supply is the project that is being developed by the Department of the Environment, Climate and Communications. That went out to tender last December. Tenders were finalised or came to a close in early December. That is something that will point to whether we are robust enough. In 2019, 56% of our electricity was generated from gas. The gas comes from the UK and our own gas field, which is winding down.

We have come from a position where nearly 90% of our gas was imported.

There is a fragility about being at the end of the line. There is a fragility that is dependent on interconnections and whether we have the right number, if they are robust enough and whether we have the right mix of technologies that will allow us to be able to continue to have a resilient electricity sector. I stated earlier that the TSO has one of the top records in the EU in respect of resilience and the number of minutes during which the electricity system drops in Ireland. It is a European leader in that regard.

While we do not have an electricity reserve agency, we do have security of supply. We would like to see the work that is ongoing finalised as quickly as possible because that in itself might influence the way that we deal with the technologies into the future.

On the community side, the electricity sector is very supportive of community projects. The RESS auctions allowed for those community projects to come on board. A number of them did subscribe to that. From an association point of view, we would like to see us achieving decarbonisation of the electricity system as quickly as possible. We would not be fans of the idea of ring-fencing. Rather, we would support any unused quota being used to ensure that whatever money is available through those auctions delivers the solution as cost-effectively and as quickly as possible. If communities can be assisted to be involved in that, we are all supportive of it.

In terms of stranded assets, I ask Mr. Douglas to comment on market design and how it is managed to avoid unintended exits from the market.