Ms Aoife MacEvilly:

With wholesale costs, we set the market rules and the generators compete. We do not set the wholesale price in the same way as we set the network charge but we set the rules by which they compete. Over time, we would see prices rise and fall. We can provide the Senator with some information from previous periods. What you would see is that the price on the wholesale market broadly tracks the underlying costs, which are largely driven by gas prices. We set out the curve of gas prices and you can see the wholesale price rising and falling, almost completely aligned with those underlying costs. In recent months, the cost of carbon has also had an impact but you can see that prices on the wholesale market are clearly higher than we have seen before due to gas prices. However, in 2020 with the onset of Covid, gas prices dropped quite significantly and you could see wholesale prices reduce in line with those.