Ms Karen Doyle:

One of the unintended consequences we need to look at relates to making sure we build in the right areas with the right size and get the economies of scale that are needed. We do not believe 200 plants are needed to the get to 5.7 TWh and we have conducted a lot of market consultation on this where we have gone out to see who is ready to build. We are looking at planning our own network to be able to take these plants online, and we are seeing average-sized plants, of the 40 GW size, which is significantly higher than what was anticipated in the climate action plan. That is good because where we get those economies of scale, it will, obviously, be cheaper to deliver. That is what we are seeing.

Interestingly, we are also seeing that probably twice the number of plants are ready to build than is our ambition. There is huge pent-up demand both on the developer side, that is, those who will ultimately build the plants, and on the demand side, that is, customers who are using gas at the moment, looking to decarbonise and setting out plans for the mid-2020s that they want to achieve. They are very interested in the ability to get renewable gas to disperse fossil fuels, not least in areas where electrification is very challenging.

The message from us today is that, commercially, there is a huge opportunity for Ireland and both developers and users want this to happen. The critical point is that the strategy needs to be correct to avoid unintended consequences such as those in Germany, where there was more support for building plants under a certain size that would not need specific planning permissions and so on, resulting in an awful lot of smaller plants being built for electrical purposes only. They are now having challenges keeping those plants online because they cannot compete at the price.