Speeches by Downie.

“As someone who lived in Scotland when they were doing Beauly-Denny, I remember the utter water torture that was for absolutely everyone involved frankly. Lastly, because I am conscious of my time, moving on to offshore wind and probably to you as well, Tom. You have seen a bit of a contrast between, again Scotland and …”

“Yes. Tom, I am quite interested in your perspective—obviously you worked on this for a number of years—who should be responsible for resolving those curtailment costs we have seen, and any other reflections more generally as well?”

“How do we make sure that does not happen with the decisions being made now that we effectively actually join those things together and we avoid that decoupling?”

“I get the pleasure of being the last person to question, which means I get a slight chance to reflect on what has happened so far. I have some questions specifically around zonal pricing but, reflecting on the points made so far, to my mind an efficient market is one that is transparent, least complex as possible and o…”

“Does anyone else want to come in?”

“I will move on to questions around zonal pricing. We obviously had the decision over the summer of the Government on zonal pricing, which was after some delay. What effect do you think that delay had on different parts of the system? How effective do you think the package of measures that the Government have put forwar…”

“You mentioned some of the signals that you could give on location price signals. What might some of them be?”

“For the other two panel members: do you think the seven years that the Government argued they would take to deliver zonal pricing was correct or do you think that was maybe a little bit of being scared?”

“You think it was too small. What do you think would have been a more realistic number and do you think that was one of the major reasons they would have decided against it?”

“It feels a bit like we have built a system that we do not like, we do not think works, it is not effective, but we do not know how to change it, and we are not entirely sure if we should.”

“Yes, you see grid connections, so 10-plus years, grid connections and decisions made in good faith that then you have a lovely planning permission that actually is utterly worthless, and those figures are then counted.”

“I want to ask some questions around renewables and network infrastructure siting and whether or not that will impact on consumer costs. As someone who has spent 10 plus years working in planning and communications in Scotland, largely on renewables projects, I have seen some good and some bad in terms of siting. We hav…”

“That is really helpful. Thank you.”

“Short term is 2030, medium term is 2030 to 2035, and long term is post-2035?”

“What is medium term?”

“A truthful answer is always the answer we want.”

“What do you mean by “short run”?”

“Very briefly, we have heard in both sessions lots of mentions of short term, long term and medium term. What does that mean in your world? When we are talking about an inquiry into the cost of energy and how we get bills down, what is a realistic way to do that in the short term and what do you mean by short term? We h…”

“As someone who lived in Scotland when they were doing Beauly-Denny, I remember the utter water torture that was for absolutely everyone involved frankly. Lastly, because I am conscious of my time, moving on to offshore wind and probably to you as well, Tom. You have seen a bit of a contrast between, again Scotland and …”

“Yes. Tom, I am quite interested in your perspective—obviously you worked on this for a number of years—who should be responsible for resolving those curtailment costs we have seen, and any other reflections more generally as well?”