Ms Bernice Doyle:

On the investment signal piece of it, maybe the blessing and the curse of battery storage is it can do different things. There is this concept of revenue stacking. A six-hour battery, say, can be used to cover amber alert capacity events in the market so capacity can be provided but this daily balancing function can also be done for renewables where companies can charge at times of excess renewables and discharge at time of low renewables. It can do both those things. It can also to the system service, that is, the very fast response, so it can do many different things.

In Ireland we have been very successful at delivering short-duration half-hour batteries to date. We are actually kind of done and dusted for the moment because of the technical requirement. That deployment has happened on the back of clear market signals there were two parallel markets, namely, a tariff market and an auction market, which were signalled way back in 2019 when we in Statkraft invested in the first battery project. Once developers have clear sight of a market, even for a few years, and they have a reasonable chunk of their capital expenditure that they can see a line of sight of getting a return on, they are an optimistic bunch and will invest. The pipeline is there.

The problem at the moment in getting from that short duration to the multi-hour, daily balancing-type application is we do not have any kind of anchor revenue stream. We need to do that either by way of a capacity market contract that will cover a portion of our revenue and then we will take some assumptions on what we can get in that daily trading market or the congestion product Mr. Ryan and Mr. Smith have talked about where one builds battery storage behind a constraint and use it to avoid network build-out. Those are two examples of how a product could be defined and a contract given that would give an amount of certainty to developers to go ahead and move on these projects. That is what we are missing at the moment and where we need to move.