Professor Barry McMullin:

I thank Deputy Whitmore. I will try to be brief. To clarify, demand management is used in two quite different senses. There is a technical sense that one will hear the system operator, EirGrid, use in terms of demand management. That is about moving energy demand around within, say, a 12-to-24 hour period. It is not reducing the total amount of energy used. It is changing somewhat, within a few hours, when exactly it is used. That is important for managing the peak demand but it is almost irrelevant to emissions. That form of demand management is not what I have been talking about. I have been talking about managing the total annual energy demand that we have quite independently of that sort of short-term shifting of demand in time by a few hours.

I agree with Deputy Whitmore. The measures to do that form of society-wide demand management are tricky and there are risks of undue burdens falling on individuals. I refer the Deputy to the other document I submitted, which was a submission to the Citizens' Assembly on the tradeable emissions quotas, TEQs, idea. I will not go into the details now but I commend it to the Deputy's attention. That is a way of trying to balance the effective rationing of emissions across individuals, corporations and wider society.

In terms of the data centres or the large energy users that have already been built out, I am not a lawyer and I will not pretend to advise on legal exposure to the State depending what measures it might adopt.

Again, the technical system I mentioned would, as the emissions cap was reduced, require that those corporate entities with large emissions footprints would have to take progressively stronger and more expensive actions to mitigate it. They would either successfully mitigate it or decide the activity was no longer worth it or profitable and would stop doing it. That might lead to reductions for that reason. That would be appropriate. That would be the economics of carbon pricing as opposed to carbon taxing doing what it says on the tin.