Liam Ryan:
... Ireland, we're actually at... Last year, 43% on average of our electricity camp from renewable sources, which meant at times we were operating the power system where 70% of our instantaneous electricity came from renewable sources. And in Ireland, that's mainly non-synchronous-types of generation like solar and wind onto system. And that's no easy achievement noting that we have very limited interconnection between Ireland and the rest of Europe.
Liam Ryan:
But we didn't do it on our own. It's not, "EirGrid has done this." It is the Irish ecosystem that's really delivered. What I mean by that is going, the conventional generators, the [inaudible 00:00:54], the new technologies coming onto system, the renewable generation folks, all working collaboratively together to solve the challenges that we actually had.
Timothy Mortlock:
Smart meters have local communications built into them, which means that they can provide real-time energy consumption and price information for the matter to in-home devices, things like in-home displays apps and so on. They empower consumers by providing immediate visibility over their energy usage and the cost of that usage. And when we install smart meters, we actually provide energy efficiency advice to people on how to benefit from that data in terms of their own behavior within the home.
Timothy Mortlock:
Firstly, smart meters measure both the import and export of energy from the home. So that enables a much more distributed energy system with local, renewable generation and storage, including vehicle-to-grid from electric vehicles in the future, as well, meaning that the home and the building can play an active part in balancing generation and demand on the grid.
Felix Chow-Kambitsch:
The moment lithium ion is the main battery of choice, not necessarily because it's what the grid needs, but it's where the technology has brought us.
Felix Chow-Kambitsch:
The big shifts are I think that I would look out for in terms of battery technology, something like Canadian Flow technology, which has the capacity to have longer duration and less degradation.
Felix Chow-Kambitsch:
It's not only battery technology, but longer duration something. And we don't have a solution just yet of what that is, it may be a storage technology. But that longer duration something could also be hydrogen, carbon capturing storage. There isn't currently a technology that can support, I guess in the German technical term the [foreign language 00:02:44] period where you have essentially a two, three-week-period window when yet you don't have any wind generation. And then, what's there? Batteries aren't the solution. You do need that zero carbon or low carbon solution for the two, three-week gap in wind production.