 Thank you Evine and good morning everybody. On behalf of ESP I'd like to extend a very well welcome to everybody here. This conference has generated a huge interest from people across diverse roles and sectors and it just demonstrates the extent to which climate change has come way up to the agenda but also the extent to which electricity is increasingly being recognised as an enabling force for the decarbonisation of society and from an ESP perspective it has been truly fantastic to work with the IAEA yet again on this fabulous conference and its fantastic speaker line up. There is no doubt as both Alex said in his opening and the minister also that 2019 is the seminal year for energy and climate in Ireland and we should not underestimate the importance of what has been achieved this year in setting Ireland on a path to a low carbon future. This is the culmination of various initiatives going back many years and have been discussed at conferences like this over the last number of years to advance public policy and thinking and understanding of the energy challenges that we face in society. Recently and again Alex touched on this the Citizens Assembly and the Erachters Committee on Climate Action bought a climate debate into the public domain and provided clear and balanced recommendations for action. The Government's Climate Action Plan published this year has built on both of these and sets out a clear roadmap and a framework for delivery. We are now at a point where we have almost universal agreement across the whole of the political system, government industry and society that we must act and we now have a clear policy framework on which to do so. As Minister Bruton says it's time for action and for leadership. Of course it's not the start of the journey for a lot of people in this room. In our case in ESB we have been working on this for over a decade. We've been investing new technologies to support the transition to clean low-carbon electricity. We see the role that electricity can play as a catalyst for reducing carbon in many sectors of our economy and we're harnessing the resources of our whole organization to this end. It is the core of our strategy. The scale of the challenge of course cannot be underestimated. Ireland's legacy electricity infrastructure has evolved over nearly a century and it's based on a legacy design where electricity comes by and large from large centralized power stations feeding out over predominantly radio networks to passive customers and for most of the past 100 years there are only a small number of power stations on the system and the network was designed by and large to ship power in one direction. Now in contrast the low-carbon electricity system of the future will be made up of millions of distributed energy assets that's distributed right to the level of the individual homeowner and all of these will work together and alongside more traditional technologies in a much more coordinated dynamic and inefficient way and these distributed assets will include batteries, electric vehicles, wind and solar generation, heat pumps, smart meters and so on and so on and all of these operating as part of a connected two-way network with information and electricity flowing between devices to bring power to consumers when and where it is needed. So this is a completely reimagined electricity system with an informed and an engaged customer and citizen right at its heart. In Ireland despite the fact that carbon intensity of electricity generation has had since 1990 electricity generation as a proportion of end-use energy consumption has stayed static at around 20%. Likewise the transport and heating sectors which together account for over a third of carbon emissions have remained resolutely dependent on fossil fuels. As the electricity system decarbonizes increasingly and with increasing urgency around the threat of climate change there will be an inexorable shift towards electrification. There's a growing international level to support this including reports from the European Commission and the National Energy Renewable Lab in the United States. A study published last year by your electric model a number of scenarios and found that direct electrification of between 38 and 60 percent of the EU's economy will be needed to meet the target set out in the Paris agreement. In the most ambitious scenarios almost two-thirds of transport and building energy and up to 50 percent of industrial processes will be directly electrified. The government's climate action plan recognizes the role of electricity as a catalyst for decarbonized society and economy. Specifically it includes ambitious targets to increase reliance on renewables from 30 percent to 70 percent as outlined by Minister Bruce earlier for electricity generation and widespread electrification of the transport and heating sectors. It plans for the installation of 400,000 heat pumps and electric vehicle uptake of almost one million by 2030 recognizing that both of these technologies can deliver both immediate and longer term carbon savings. ESB is fully committed to playing our part in making this a reality. We're in the process of replacing high carbon thermal generation with low carbon and renewable alternatives. We have a pipeline of new generation coming on stream that will include solar and offshore wind and our target is to reduce the carbon intensity of our generation mix by two-thirds by 2030 and to achieve full carbon neutrality by 2050. We're making significant investments in the electricity network to support the electrification of heat and transport. We're working actively with customers in all market segments on transitioning to low carbon and we've recently announced significant investment to enhance the public charging infrastructure for electric vehicles with support from the Irish government's Climate Action Fund. All this is being progressed in the context of an increasingly clear technology roadmap for a low carbon economy based on proven and available technologies and that is really important that we use technologies today that are proven and available. We know that abundant renewable energy can produce from wind and solar and that the cost of these technologies is falling all of the time. We also know that it will be possible to fully decarbonise electricity system and we know that even with the current electricity mix and the carbon intensity of current electricity mix, we can extend the use of electricity far beyond existing applications to achieve immediate carbon reductions and their quality improvements. This is particularly true of the transport and heating sectors where electric vehicles and heat pumps at least treat four times more efficient than the technologies they will replace. However, the transition from a high carbon to a low carbon future goes far beyond enabling technologies and infrastructure and the engineering and the economics of those. We should not underestimate the cultural and mindset shift that needs to go with this and again this was a key theme running through the Minister's address. Knowing the path is one thing but convincing customers and citizens and communities embrace it as something entirely different. Ultimately it will be the willingness of individuals and communities to adopt new technologies, accept infrastructure in their communities and engage more actively with the electricity system that will determine the pace and the scale and effectiveness of this change. Although dependence on electricity has increased dramatically over the decades, the way in which people actually think about and use electricity hasn't really changed. The industry has by and large taken customer for granted and customer has taken the availability of electricity for granted. Even tariff structured have largely remained unchanged with the exception of so called night and day tariffs. Consumers have by and large acted freely and use electricity at any time of the day at the same price regardless of costs to the overall system. We have not expected customers to adapt their behaviour in any way to meet system requirements or to interact with the energy system beyond maybe the odd time reading or meters. However, our emerging vision of the system of the future is that of a more informed, of a more engaged customer as an integral part of the electricity system. This is very, very different from what we have today. And faced with an array of choices and new technologies ranging from micro generation and electric cars to battery storage, to home energy heating upgrades and smart appliances. Some customers will have to take full and active role with the energy system and get involved. Others will remain passive unless it becomes extremely simple or financially attractive to them. And others will not engage at all. And in ESB, we're putting a lot of effort into try to understand what drives customer, drives customer thinking, what drives customer behaviour. And we're noticing a much greater interest among our customers where electricity comes from and has potential uses in addressing climate change. But this isn't universal. In focus groups, we've seen resistance from customers to the idea of using time of introducing time abuse tariffs, which will smooth out demand peaks. And this is in spite of the benefits to everybody. This is of course legitimate from a customer's perspective. For some people, especially those in fuel poverty, or those who cannot afford to invest in energy efficiency, changing consumption patterns can be difficult if not impossible. On the other hand, we see plenty of early adopters who are well prepared to invest in and try new technologies. Ultimately, what people want more than anything else is simplicity and value for money. And if we need customers to change their patterns of behaviour in this new integrated dynamic electricity system, they will have to understand the broader rationale for their participation in such a system and see a seamless pathway to something that is significantly better for them individually and for society collectively. There's no question of the public that are well informed of the potential of electrification and feeling empowered to involve themselves and their communities in adopting sustainable technologies will be hugely helpful and beneficial in achieving the necessary changes. But to really encourage customers to get on board, we need to provide them with products and services that directly respond to their needs, motivations and their everyday challenges. And this is not something the electricity industry has been used to in its nine decades of existence. This requires collaborative and iterative ways of working to constantly bring the voice of the customer into the innovation and product development processes. And in ESB, we're putting in place structures to make this possible. We've set up new insights and co-creation processes to ensure that we are driven by the needs of our customers rather than by our own assumptions or technological expertise or indeed by our legacy system biases. One of the steps we've taken is to have a dedicated innovation hub. We've located away from our main business. We incubate and we develop new products to design thinking processes involving the customer at every stage of development. And then we try to bring these ideas then back into the business and make them mainstream. In Electric Ireland, we hold weekly focus groups to gain insights about the lives and perspectives of customers and establish smarter living customer panels to try to give feedback and emerging products and services. We're also using ethnographic research to understand the way our customers use energy in their daily lives and how we can support them in this. We're collaborating with communities and behavioral economists to make sure that the network of the future and in this largely distributed world of the future, the network is the piece that brings it all together. And to make sure that the network then is fit for purpose is a big challenge. Later this afternoon, you'll hear Clare Duffy from ESB Networks talk about work we're doing in three communities in Dingill, in Limerick, and in the Arran Islands to trial new technologies and to see the level of customer uptake and customer engagement and then how the network then can be configured and designed and developed to meet the needs of the future electricity customer. However, achieving simplicity for customers is remarkably complex. This is a complex industry. And, you know, when we sit down as engineers and economists and regulators, you know, there might be a tendency to make it even more complex. But for the customer to buy into this, we need simplicity. We need to collaborate across policy, regulatory, market, participant interest and customer and community interest to bring all of this together to deliver compelling and intuitive customer experience that will drive innovation and benefit, that will drive innovation and investment for the benefit of all of society. It is particularly important that the drive to decarbonize does not come at the expense of the poorest in society. Investing in new technologies like heat pumps, micro generation, electric vehicles may be a rational choice for those with higher disposable incomes, but those who cannot afford to participate cannot be left to bear the cost of the increasing fixed costs embedded in the energy system. Although that goal that the minister has outlined in the Climate Action Plan is ambitious and it is audacious, the transition away from today's carbon-intensive world to electrification is achievable. However, it requires well-informed engaged public, compelling customer-centric propositions and an enabling policy in the regulatory environment that unleashes innovation and protects the most vulnerable in our society. The Climate Action Plan sets out a clear path for the transition to a low carbon future. It undoubtedly presents huge challenges in terms of delivery, but is a huge opportunity to completely transform our energy system to effect fundamental societal change and to leave a really positive legacy for future generations. Today's line of speakers are all contributing to this vision and I want to congratulate Alex and Jill at the IAEA on putting together such a thought-provoking program, fabulous array of top-class speakers and hopefully today's conversations will spark new ideas and perspectives that will help to accelerate the transition to a brighter energy future for all of us. Enjoy the conference. Thank you.