Mr. Michael Mahon:

I will start but perhaps my colleague, Dr. Ryan, may wish to touch on that. There seems to have been a little bit of a lull on the planning decisions on the wind projects. They seem to be slower at coming to us for engagement for a grid connection to advance them. I would like to think that what we have seen in the past couple of months is that that is starting to speed up.

Planning decisions for solar farms seem to be coming through faster too, but the pipeline also has to be looked at. There is a strong pipeline for both wind and onshore solar projects that can come along in the next number of years. One of the things we have clearly highlighted, and Dr. Ryan might want to touch on this, relates to Shaping our Electricity Future. That document sets out how we can develop and evolve the grid to be able to connect much of the onshore wind and solar at particular parts of the network while minimising the need for new infrastructure. For example, the north Connacht project I mentioned is now going into construction. That is able to effectively evacuate many of the wind projects currently being built in the north Connacht area. However, we have not factored in for multiple more projects to come in in that area because there are sufficient potential connections in other parts of the network to build on that without significant new circuits. Dr. Ryan might want to talk about shaping in that context.