Mr. Jim Gannon:

Much of what I have spoken about in terms of having dialogue with the data centre industry has been covered by Mr. Foley and I do not want to repeat it. The text of our proposed decision would have described not necessarily a move to the countryside, but co-location, focusing on how we can incentivise demand and supply to co-locate, which reduces the need to invest as much in this infrastructure. It also reduces some of the transmission losses mentioned by one of the Deputy's colleagues earlier.

The second piece is around moving the demand of data centres, where required. This is commonly used by the data centre community in the US, for example, where data centres turn down processing during the daytime when they need to use lots of air conditioning, which is highly energy-intensive, and turn up processing at night. It is, therefore, a matter of getting them to adapt not to a day-night peak, but to a peak that might not just be between 4 p.m. and 7 p.m., as we generally have it in Ireland, and to also respond to times of significantly scarce wind. This year alone, we had times in March when wind was giving us over 4,000 MW and times in September when it was giving us less than 40 MW. Wind can be contrary like that. As we take advantage of it and decarbonise, we need to look for some solutions. As Mr. Foley said, the other options are also battery power, which does not just take advantage of excess wind but can also feed it back to the system in times of need, and the on-site generation to which he referred. These are some of the examples.