Mr. Nicholas Tarrant:

There are three questions the Deputy asked us to cover. Going back to the first question about the transport of electricity to places of higher demand from places where there is generation, if one looks at the history - it is no surprise - of wind projects right across Ireland, particularly along the west coast, at windier sites, for example, the project in Oweninny in Mayo or many others from Donegal to Kerry, they are developed and then, through their grid connection, whether it be on the distribution network or on transmission, those power flows are managed by us in ESB Networks from the point of view of the distribution network as we are the distribution system operator and the balancing of supply and demand and transmission is by EirGrid. There is a significant number of new projects to be built out to 2030 and probably beyond. There are approximately 380 transmission projects of different sizes to be developed and built out to help with achieving the overall target of 17 GW between onshore wind and solar by 2030.

Moving to the Deputy's question about the payback period for farms and domestic households, we are seeing very significant growth in this area with solar. For example, and we covered it in our opening statement, we have 94,000 domestic rooftop installations on and it is growing at a rate of 750 a week. There was continued big growth from 2022 into 2023. That growth is continuing in 2024 as solar installers are expanding and people see the benefit of doing it. There is a payment for customers. Such payments are ultimately set by the supply company that they deal with but one of the benefits of the smart metering programme is that it allows people to get credit for the power that they are exporting from domestic rooftop solar installations.

In the area of farms, particularly if one looks at the TAMS grant scheme that was launched by the Minister in the early part of last year with a 60% grant available for putting in what we call "mini-gen", which is a size up from rooftop solar on domestic rooftops, or small-scale generation, which is up to 200 kW, the next size up again, there is considerable benefit for farmers to install that. That grant scheme is designed around an energy audit that is done on the farm. It is about self-consumption. Those farmers have the ability to get a payment for the amount that they might be exporting but it is very much geared towards their own consumption, and, as I am sure the committee has discussed, particularly for dairy farms where they have a big power requirement for milking, cooling of milk, water heating, etc. They are important projects. We are seeing farms coming through our process. We expect that will grow because the payback period, from where we are sitting, looks to be beneficial to farmers.