Ossian Smyth (Dún Laoghaire, Green Party) | Oireachtas source

One of the criteria is that we have sufficient grid capacity to attach new generation capacity, so we can distribute and transmit the electricity from the site. Another is that we must have a brownfield site that already has a power station on it. We are looking for sites that have had recent environmental assessments carried out, which can help us with our future assessments and give us an idea that we are going to pass the environmental assessment. We also want to consider whether we expect that this is going to be the shortest planning application process that is going to be required. We have measured all of the sites on that basis. We have come up with the two sites that we thought were best. There is really only a very small number of sites that are possible, but it is all part of the same project. It is normal in a project that the project has a scope, which is the delivery of 450 MW of power by the winter of 2023, and there is an available set of resources that may be used, but we do not want to limit ourselves whereby if anything goes wrong on the critical path the whole project stops and has to be restarted.