Mr. Bobby Smith:

I will add a bit to that. The view in industry is that the maximum duration lithium-ion batteries can provide is approximately eight hours. That seems to be the prevailing view at the moment. They are particularly well suited to shorter-term applications, which we have seen in Ireland in the context of those frequency response services that require a millisecond response and maybe 30 minutes to one hour in terms of the duration of that response. That is what they are very good at. There certainly will be applications for them within day balancing, that is, balancing evening peaks, night-time troughs and that kind of thing. They will be very good at that and will be part of the solution. However, when we look at longer duration forms of technology and that game-changer report I talked about earlier that looked at up to 100 hours, it is going to be something else.

The technology Mr. Blount talked about uses iron, for instance. Other technologies like hydrogen seem to be particularly well suited there. Many battery manufacturers are now looking at sodium as a potential mineral because it is abundant and can do longer durations. It is more suited to that application. We will see a lot of innovation in this space, with new technologies coming to the fore.

Regarding the auction, just in case we were giving the impression that we want to do this all in one big go, that is not the case. Having a staggered, iterative approach that we can learn from is the best option, we believe. We can potentially run the first auction in 2025. There are probably more established technologies that can compete in this. Then we can have auctions in subsequent years or every two years, or whatever it turns out to be, in which newer technologies can compete, once they are more established. It is a case of learning from the process all the time and trying to build on it.

On the question of how far away from the source, if we are looking at hybrid projects there is policy in that area that needs to be fixed, for want of a better word. If we get hybrid policy sorted, it is likely that we will see energy storage projects co-located with wind or solar farms, using the existing or planned grid connections. That is a very effective use of the current grid infrastructure. In any case, storage is a very flexible asset so we will likely see projects built close to renewable generation or strategic areas of the grid, where they can be of most benefit. That will be developer-led, but developers will be modelling these solutions and knowing the areas of the grid where their projects will be of most benefit.