Mr. John Melvin:

The last amber alert was last August and that was in the middle of the pre-winter maintenance season. A significant amount of work was done throughout last summer to get catch-up maintenance done on some plants and to get normal maintenance done on other plants in order that we might have better availability of the equipment for the winter season. The evidence thus far is that the availability of the equipment was better in the winter that we just had. Part of that is driven by the way the people in the control room in EirGrid operate the machines as well. We had a significant number of interventions, both in the summer time in terms of maintenance and throughout the whole winter in terms of operations and greater communications between France and Ireland. Things were tight in those three jurisdictions so there was really enhanced operational responsiveness at the transmission and storage options, TSO level. There were greater communications to industry. For example, there is a margin figure that gets published and both the generator industries and the demand people can see what things are like over the next four days in particular with wind demands. At any point where there was a particular concern, there were communications again to industry to say the next day or so might be tight. That allows demand-side units and entities that can change their behaviours to change their behaviours.

On the tariffs, as Mr. Gannon mentioned earlier, there was a visible change in demand at those peak times of 5 p.m. to 7 p.m. We are going to further consider that and understand what the drivers were, as Mr. Gannon said. Some elements of it could well be related to the tariff changes that we made. There was a significant amount of work in a significant number of areas, not luck but lots of work. When there was high demand there was some wind and there was the prospect of further support from Great Britain. Those aspects might not always match in the same way in the future but we did hit a peak demand. Other hands are up so I will stop.