Professor Aoife Foley

Well, I suppose at that stage it was the dash for gas and they wanted everybody to switch from coal and oil because of the large upfront costs.

to natural gas.

But at the same time, ESB was introducing night-time rate tariffs and storage heating tariffs to shift away from electricity use at peak times.

So this was sort of coming out of the last energy crisis because it was in the 80s and the 90s.

So the system in the UK is going through the same transition that we're going through here in terms of

are changing our energy mix so whereas we had coal then we have gas now we have wind in the uk it's wind nuclear and we still have gas it's how do we know optimize a new system but we have the added problem then of a liberalized market we don't have just esp and just board gosh anymore yeah so we've other companies that operate and that's really now where we need to change the system and that's what niso

is doing um and actually this system this flexibility it's demand side management it um integrates um or optimizes the the transmission system and the distribution system for localized grid constraints where you dump energy at night and in this case it's

wind, but it could be solar as well if it was Spain and Portugal.

In Ireland, it would be wind also, but in the UK, it will be also nuclear as Hinkley and the other plants as they get to generate larger and more nuclear comes online.

No.

Now, I suppose, David, what we need to be careful of here is that the free line is, I suppose, is a bit sensationalist in the journalism.

You know, it's all about targeted interventions and that's what the tariffs do.

So these flexible tariffs...

They get people to use their electricity and their energy consumption because it can be across gas as well and it can be across heating and cooling.

So it's about better energy consumption.

So what that system does or what that approach does is it sort of inverts the wholesale in the retail market.

And rather than, say, in the case of Octopus Energy, where he wanted locational marginal pricing, which means that basically it facilitates him and his market model in his energy company to make more money.

He'd be like the Ryanair of the energy world, is the better way to put it.

But then the large sort of former semi-state energy companies where they get their payment for gas, then their constraints, then their ancillary service payments, which cost, say, for example, now in Ireland, curtailment, already no cost.

about, well, in the UK, £940 million for the first three months of this year.