Mr. Tom Marren:

No. We have had engagement with them but we are also working internally with some of our members to pull together a paper on that. The engagement to date has been very positive and they understand that this is a different way of utilising the grid. That firm-non-firm process is already in place for the wind generators and it was also recently brought into the data centres.

If we look at it very practically, a lot of the customers will be retrofitting in, so we already have boilers and all of our infrastructure in place. This can be a very viable, flexible demand on the network, and we have estimated it is potentially about 1,000 MW of flexible demand if we get the industrial heat. Therefore, we could switch off for an hour at peak or switch off for a week, which is very difficult to do for other forms of storage, such as battery storage and all of that. This is potentially a real area that networks like EirGrid, eHeat Ireland and other departments need to work on in order to avoid as much as possible the level of infrastructure that Irish Distillers and Boston Scientific are currently incurring. Other companies just cannot incur that.

We should also remember our dairy sector along the west coast, where there is a lot of renewable energy. There is a lot of industry there, which means we could potentially bring this in very quickly. As members are aware, a lot of these constraints and curtailments are more on the east coast.