Speeches by Young.

“Perhaps I could come to Ana for this one. Could establishing PPAs between constrained renewable generators and public sector facilities reduce curtailment and lock in affordable energy?”

“Do you want to add anything to that, Tom?”

“Thank you, Chair. I will ask about corporate power purchase agreements. Obviously both PPAs and CfDs allow developers to mitigate revenue uncertainty by locking in long-term prices. If a CfD price is competitive why is it so rare to see developers pursuing PPAs instead?”

“That could apply, regardless of whether you have PPAs or not. That is generally making it easier to develop renewables. Is there anything specifically to do with PPAs in terms of supporting more use of those in the private sector?”

“Are there any other support mechanisms you are aware of in other major European power markets that we could be learning from?”

“Is that something that is done elsewhere? I am wondering if we can learn any lessons.”

“Adam or Tom, did you have anything?”

“Do you think the Government could be doing more to enable the private sector’s use of PPAs? Potentially then you could free up more of the AR budget for less mature technologies.”

“Not necessarily public sector facilities? You do not see that as—”

“Perhaps I could come to Ana for this one. Could establishing PPAs between constrained renewable generators and public sector facilities reduce curtailment and lock in affordable energy?”

“Do you want to add anything to that, Tom?”

“Thank you, Chair. I will ask about corporate power purchase agreements. Obviously both PPAs and CfDs allow developers to mitigate revenue uncertainty by locking in long-term prices. If a CfD price is competitive why is it so rare to see developers pursuing PPAs instead?”

“Is that something you can only identify after the fact?”

“How would you do that?”

“We cannot just immediately turn it off?”

“How do you identify bad energy trading in this context?”

“Okay. Thank you. If I could turn to Michael Grubb then. You have already talked about some of the ways we could change—if gas is going to stay in our generating mix for some time, which is the assumption, You have already talked about some of the ways its economics might be regulated so that bills can come down. Do you…”

“It feels to me that whatever the situation is, changing the mix might have a very small effect because we are one small part of the market on worldwide gas price, but LNG is always going to be the driver of the price.”

“If you were to, for example, have new pipelines and significantly increase the proportion of pipeline imports or you were looking at domestic offshore or shale supplies or any of those things it would not make any difference to this question. Would the LNG price still be the driver?”

“If we were to build storage instead, the LNG price would still matter but we would have more control over when we were buying it.”