Eamon Ryan (Dublin Bay South, Green Party) | Oireachtas source

I expect it to be concluded before the end of this year. I will have to come back to the Deputy on exactly how long it will take to put in the regulatory systems.

I will finish on the third point I was going to raise, which addresses the Deputy's question, in a sense. It comes out of recent conversations with EirGrid on its shaping of our electricity 2.0, as it were. Very good work has been done by EirGrid on that. One of the ways the electricity system is evolving, and we saw this during the offshore auctions, is around the risk of constraint or curtailment. When we have so much renewable power, what do we do when there is surplus power? I now believe the management of that risk, cost or price should not lie with the developer but with the State, EirGrid, the ESB and how we use that power. By the end of this decade, with the developing solar, offshore wind and onshore wind projects we know we will deliver, we will have a significant surplus of electricity. We need to design the system so we can convert that into new business, industrial or other decarbonising opportunities. We are one of the countries ahead of the game in that. We have probably the highest level of renewable variable power on an integrated synchronistic system. One of the key issues we have is thinking about how we use our surplus power. We know those projects will be there by the end of the decade and designing the end use to benefit from that will be part of the shaping of the electricity future we need to design.

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