Ms Aoife MacEvilly:

On the question about the demand trajectories, we note that in the security of supply report published yesterday by the Minister there are similar graphs for electricity and gas demand that show Ireland is on a different trajectory to the rest of Europe in respect of the growth in demand for electricity and gas. The EU is a big place and there may be other countries where demand is growing and still other countries where demand is decreasing. However, we are on a different trajectory to the overall average.

The Senator asked about data centres. In the new data centre connection policy, we looked for on-site back-up generation. We are completely open to that being a combination of on-site renewables and battery storage, which might work in some cases. As a part of the new approach to carbon sectoral emission limits, that is something we start to look to in order to understand their impact on future growth in this kind of space because it is-----