Ms Siobh?n McHugh:

I thank Deputy Cronin for her question. I was heartened to hear her mention the words "whole-of-system thinking". That is exactly what we need. Her colleague, Senator Boylan, mentioned the demand-side strategy. This is where this comes in. Demand response is one element of a broader demand-side strategy. We have energy efficiency, which is the foundation of everything, the demand response, and then price-based and tariff-based mechanisms. Demand response, in its pure sense, is taking place with industrial and commercial customers. As we electrify heating, vehicles and transport, our homes will have batteries, solar panels, an EV charger outside and a heat pump. That becomes important in terms of the controllability of those to provide services in the future or to be incentivised by price. There is that ecosystem.

To note the number of agencies and different parties involved, there is the Sustainable Energy Authority of Ireland, which does excellent work, and our colleagues in ESB Networks, for which this will become an increasing challenge on its network because of the electrification of all these different sources and uses. It has a programme of work in place and is looking at that. The solutions are manifold. They are direct demand response, location based and price based and they need to be thoroughly considered in the round.

The Deputy asked what would be the one thing we would recommend to the Minister. We would say the Minister should take the excellent action included in the climate action plan of having 20% to 30% of demand as flexible and to be very specific about which routes some of that needs to take. Some of it will be a demand response providing services to the grid, as we discussed, some of it will be locational on the distribution network and some of it will be price based via tariffs and different controllability of devices in homes, SMEs, farms, etc. We need to make that work for what the system needs. We need that round view of it. We need a clear target to be set, that being the target we have already, but we need to make that actionable and accountable and to work with the other actors in the sector to drive it forward and make sure it delivers.