 I'll start by just saying that this study is all about a project I carried out in my own free time about two years ago called Green Clan Ireland, which is where you could say I took a lot of the concepts that are being developed in Denmark right now and tried to apply them to a Irish context to see what the impact would be. And the long-term ambition in Denmark is to be 100% renewable. That's not just something that's happening in an academic sphere, but that is, let's say, the national objective that the government wants us to implement. Usually the year that's specified for that is the year 2050, so there's not a whole lot of time left, you could say, when we talk about energy infrastructure, to achieve that. But it's just to say that a lot of the knowledge, a lot of the ideas, a lot of the concepts are coming out of this sphere and trying to apply them to this Irish context. But before I get into the details of all these crazy long-term changes, I'd like to talk a bit about what the energy system looks like today. So this is what I've made, is a pictorial overview in a very simple way of what the Irish energy system looks like right now. And you could say the two key things that I want to illustrate here is, number one, that the way you apply electricity, heat, and transport is very separated from one another right now. So we kind of have three layers in our energy system. We have an electricity layer, a heating layer, and a transport layer. And all three layers go back, you could say, to this fossil fuels at the very beginning of it. So even though they're all very separated from one another, they're all very dependent on fossil fuels at the beginning. And what we started to do over the last five or ten years, you could say, Ireland is bringing in a bit of wind power into our electricity sector, which I believe has just surpassed 20% of annual production right now. And I think the obvious thing that's happening when we do this type of change is that we're replacing some fossil fuels in the electricity sector with this new form of energy in the form of wind power. But what is often not as obvious is that not only are we replacing one resource with another resource, but it's the type of energy we're replacing. We're replacing an intermittent renewable energy supply for a form that was previously a stored energy form. So in other words, the way the energy system has developed in the past is that all of the flexibility has been placed on the supply side because that's where we've had all of the stored energy. We've been able to be very lazy on the demand side because whenever we needed a change, we just drew upon all of this stored energy in those fossil fuels and asked them to provide our needs whenever we wanted it to. However, the challenge is that now that we're going to rely mostly on wind power, we can no longer be lazy, you could say, in other parts of the energy system. We have to start figuring out how can we introduce the same flexibility in other parts of the energy system that we previously had the luxury of in the form of fossil fuels in the past. And I suppose the first point I want to start with is that this, to me, is not just a great change because we're replacing fossil fuels, but I want to set the tone that this is also a really good change because it's a very cost-effective thing to do. And a lot of the time when we have this discussion, a lot of the numbers can be, let's say, hidden within a lot of models and very difficult to follow. So to set the agenda at the beginning, I'm just going to give you one illustration of what the cost of electricity production is based on existing technologies for producing electricity from three types of plants. A wind farm, a base load coal-fired power station, and a base load CCGT gas plant. And if we do those calculations based on current technologies and current costs of construction and development, wind turbines are now producing electricity at a similar price to base load coal-fired power stations. That's power stations that have the luxury of operating almost all of the year around which we know our power stations won't get to do as we bring in more and more wind power. So that's just to say that changing this energy system from fossil fuels over to wind can still be done at a cost-effective level if we even have to introduce new storage technologies because the price of wind power is relatively cheap compared to what our alternatives are. And I don't think that message is sometimes clear enough in an Irish context. A lot of the time we look at wind power as a burden or something that we're forced to do, but if you do the numbers, it's not a burden, it's an opportunity to take a new form of energy production that we can produce ourselves at a very cheap price. So the good news is because the wind power is cheap, we have a bit of money to spend in order to find these new forms of stored energy that the wind power can use in order to control itself. So then the key question becomes if the wind power is cheap, so that's my conclusion number one, then the next question is well where is these new forms of cheap energy storage? How can we manage all of this wind power at a cost-effective level? And this is one of the most concerning things I see about the Irish energy debate at present is that because wind power produces electricity, a lot of people turn to the electricity sector to figure out how we can manage wind power. But the reality is that the electricity sector is where we have the most expensive form of energy storage. If we want to find a cheap way to store energy, we have to start looking beyond the electricity sector in order to manage this new form of intermittent renewables. And if we put some typical numbers on these prices, you'll find that thermal storage in district heating systems in Denmark is about 100 times cheaper than a typical electricity storage plant like Tarlac Hill or any other pumped hydro facility. So in other words, if we move to the thermal sector as our source of balancing wind power, we can get flexibility at about 100 times cheaper than we can get it in the electricity sector. Similarly, if we look to the transport sector where we have fuel storage in the form of gas or oil storage, that is about 100 times cheaper than thermal storage. In other words, the future of 100% renewable energy systems will rely on a much more deep integration of the electricity sector with the heat and transport sectors. If we're going to combine this cheap wind power with cheap ways of storing it. And this is really reflected when we look at the scale of energy storage that's also available in energy systems today. I've used Denmark as an example here because that's what I had the data for, but what this graph shows is the grey box is the size of oil storage in Denmark today which is about 50 terawatt hours. The blue box is the total annual electricity demand in Denmark today which is about 35 terawatt hours. So we have more energy stored in oil storage in Denmark than electricity we need for the full year. And that scale is indicative of how cheap it is to buy that form of energy storage. Another very interesting one in this graph is that if you look at thermal storage and the distro heating systems in Denmark, it looks tiny here at 65 gigawatt hours. But if we compare that to an Irish context, Turlock Hill which is the electricity storage facility has a capacity of just under 2 gigawatt hours. So Denmark has over 30 times more energy storage in its distro heating systems than we have here in Ireland on our electricity grid. And that has been possible because the price of these formats of storage is much cheaper. So then we get to my second conclusion which is if we want to realize this renewable energy transition we need to maximize our use of fuel and thermal storage. So how do we do this? Well this is the premise of the concept that we develop in our research group in Albor University which is something called the smart energy system concept. And in the smart energy system concept we try to figure out how do we connect wind power to these new forms of storage and what will the impact be. And this slide is something you can look at afterwards. It's just to say that we have a lot of information you can find on our website and some videos about how this functions and what exactly the theory is behind all of this. But I'll skip a lot of the details and just give you a brief overview of what it looks like. So earlier I gave you a diagram of what the energy system looks like today and this is a diagram of what the future smart energy system should look like in our point of view if we're going to cost effectively implement large scale penetrations of renewable energy. And the key point that I want to highlight here is in this future smart energy system concept the key is all about integration. It's about connecting heating transport and electricity together as much as possible because once we do that we can start to rely on fuel and thermal storage as our sources of flexibility for this intermittent wind power. In other words we can replace the flexibility that we currently get from fossil fuels with new forms of flexibility by connecting wind to these other forms of energy storage. And this is you could say the basis of what has formed this paper that I wrote called Green Plan Ireland. And before I get into the details I just want to set two other key points about this study. The first thing I want to highlight is that I made this study based on one potential idea of how we could become 100% renewable. It's not a final bullet proof cast in iron idea. It's more of giving a situation which is one possible transition. The other thing I will say is that the key difference between my work in this study and other work is not that you've never heard of this idea before. I'm sure many of you have heard about the idea of using thermal energy as a storage medium or using fuel as a storage medium. But what I've tried to do in this you could say which I believe is the new part is I've tried to quantify what is the impact of doing these things. And it's that quantification that I believe is missing a lot of the time when we have these debates because a lot of the time what people think is going to cause something doesn't actually cause it in the first place. Or at least if it does cause it, the scale of which the effect occurs doesn't match the preconceived idea about what the scale was imagined to be. So sometimes we imagine that this will cost a lot of money and until we actually quantify it we don't really see that actually it wasn't as costly as we had imagined it to be. So what I've tried to do is quantify for every step that I've implemented the energy consumption, the carbon emissions and the total energy system costs for these changes. And the way I've structured the study is I've carried out the transition in a series of steps and I've picked this order for a very specific reason. I've picked it in order of how I see the technologies as being proven today versus need further development in the future. So steps one you could say where I talk about how we can integrate wind with flexible power stations is what I would say Ireland is doing today. The way that we integrate wind power in Ireland is we simply regulate the output of our power stations. Steps two, three you could say are proven already done in a mass scale in other countries. Step four is something and five is something that we're working on. A lot of technologies are appearing. It looks likely that step four and five will happen. Whereas step six and seven where we get to the power to gas and power to fuels is very much something that's in the early stages of development. Those technologies have to be even demonstrated on a large scale. So this order of the steps is carried out in a very purposely built way you could say based on proven technology all the way to has to be carried out in some way shape or form has to be developed in some way shape or form. And I don't really have let's say the time those loads of details you can get into and you can read a lot about them in the paper. Every step is discussed individually. But for today I'll just summarize some of the key trends that I want to highlight about how you start and where you end up. I should also point out that all of these calculations are only supply side focused. And that's not to say the demand isn't important. It was simply to limit myself to some boundary of work to take on. So it's very much a supply side focused study. And here you have the first results and what this as I said I'm going to talk about the starting point and the end point. So you could say the starting point on the left is where we have a lot of fossil fuels in our energy system. Whereas at the very end you can see that we've eliminated those fossil fuels and moved to renewable energy which is primarily in the form of wind power some solar power and bioenergy. There are the three cornerstones. And the first thing I want to highlight is that when I talk about wind penetrations I'm not talking about electricity penetrations. I'm talking about total energy system penetrations. How much wind is supplying not just electricity but heating and transport also. And in the reference about five percent of our energy was coming from wind power. But what my modeling work shows is that if we start connecting wind power to these very large and cheap forms of energy storage we can technically meet around 60 to 70 percent of our energy needs using this very valuable local resource that we have in the form of wind power. My modeling work calculates what is the demand and supply on every hour of the year so it makes sure that it's technically possible to balance demand and supply every hour throughout one year to make sure that the energy system is able to function. And the limit that I reached you could say was around 65 percent of our energy needs coming from wind and some solar power as well. So the first key thing I want to demonstrate is that from a technical point of view by making these changes where we connect wind power to these cheap and large forms of storage we can integrate huge amounts of wind and solar power onto our energy system from a technical perspective. So then the big question what is it all going to cost us? So the other side of life is this demonstrates what is the cost of our energy system if we make these changes. And again there's a lot of details that you can go into with each of these steps but I want to highlight two of the most significant trends that I've identified during this quantification. Number one the total cost of our energy system don't change very much. In other words it's as cheap to use wind and these new forms of large storage as it is to continue using fossil fuels. That is a huge result but that's what we find when we make these calculations. This of course is based on certain assumptions about especially the steps six and seven technologies and how they will develop but I would say for steps one to five a lot of those technologies are already proven to develop are they're very likely to develop at the cost that we've assumed them to be. Maybe towards the latter stages you could say in steps five, six and seven there's a bit more debate but I would say at least steps one to five there's a lot of ways you can feel very comfortable that these costs are accurate but other than the total price of the energy system I think the second point which we don't discuss very much has a much bigger impact on this transition and the second point I want to make is that if you look at the reference scenario you can see the gray part represents how much money we spend on fuel so that's fuel that we import today and you could say that the way I imagine this is that our current energy system if you imagine mobile phones as a comparison we currently live on a pay-as-you-go energy system we spend very little money on investments and we buy the fuel as we go along and that has meant that we spend an awful lot of our money importing fuels from other countries because we've decided that we'd rather the cheap investment at the beginning and we'll just pay every year as we need it. In comparison you could say the renewable energy system is like the bill pay system we have to start instead of buying a bit as we go instead of investing in fuels we need to start investing in infrastructure we need to start building equipment not buying fuels as we go along and that's a very different type of energy system because a wind turbine you have to put all of the money up front the day you build it and you pay almost nothing on fuel or maintenance as you go over the 20-25 year lifetime of that technology in comparison a power station you spend very little money on the first day but you spend huge amounts of money as you operate it over its lifetime so you can see by the time we get to step seven the grey part has almost disappeared because we have very little fuel but the big challenge is the blue part because now we have a huge chunk of our energy system depending on investments and the reason that that's so challenging is because if we expect people to spend money on day one when they build the infrastructure they are going to be highly dependent on a very clear and reliable long-term strategy to know that those investments on day one will stack up for the full lifetime of that infrastructure you cannot decide on day one that you want to build a wind turbine and then five years in decide actually we called it wrong we have to go back we don't want to do it the whole idea is you have to provide very clear long-term strategies that make people feel comfortable spending this large investment on day one and this is what makes the whole agenda of having this long-term strategy so fundamental for it to work in the first place because I would imagine if we don't have these kind of long-term strategies laid out then the cost of these investments will be much more than they should be because they'll have to reflect all the risk associated with making them and that is far more important than what's happening in terms of the total costs of the technologies themselves so my fourth key conclusion is a 100% renewable energy system can have similar costs to a fossil fuel-based energy system but because we now make all of our spending on investments rather than importing fuels it's very likely to have a much bigger impact on local job creation here in Ireland and it's very likely to need to be supported by a clear and long-term strategy for how we change our energy system I'm going to move a bit now you could say from the long-term highly dramatic changes and come back to the modern day of where do we start and I think that's I suppose what's most relevant for the next few years how can we start making this transition and what I've identified as I mentioned earlier when I made these steps I've put them in order of what I think is based on proven technology versus what requires new ideas and as I said steps two and three were firstly distra-heating in the cities and secondly heat pumps in the countryside these are the two places that I believe we can start doing something which actually is based on just copying what other people are doing of course behind all of this is building lots of wind turbines in the electricity sector and just to show you that I've taken this graph about how the Swedish heat system has developed over the last 40 years so if you go to the left of this you can see the years 1960 and 1965 and the red line illustrates the distra-heating penetration on the heat market and the yellow line illustrates the heat pump penetration and as you can see in the 1960s there was almost no distra-heating and no heat pumps in Sweden if you go all the way to the right and you come to 2010 it's now 60% distra-heating in the heat system and 20-25% heat pumps in the heating sector and this is the point I want to make the reason I've put those two steps as two and three is because we can simply get on a plane go two hours away ask them how they did it and copy it there's no innovation needed no new ideas needed we don't have to create new markets we can just simply ask how previous people did it and start doing it here and that's a really, really easy way to start making this transition rather than reinventing the wheel we can learn from other technologies and replicate them so this is something I've actually been working on believe it or not, not in an Irish context but in a European context so most of my life over the last four years has been going to other European countries to explain how they can also copy Scandinavia and that I've been doing since about 2011-2012 in a study called Heat Roadmap Europe which I coordinate and lucky enough that study has some numbers in Ireland so I'm just going to give you some very rough estimates as to why I think district heating could be something that we could start very soon in Ireland to begin this transition to 100% renewable energy I won't talk so much about the heat pumps because I think a lot of people are in that debate right now I think the district heating debate is where I see almost no discussions so I just want to put some things on the table that might get people started in that dialogue and the first thing I want to highlight is that as part of Heat Roadmap Europe we made the first-ever pan-European heat atlas so this heat atlas shows what the heat demand is for every kilometer squared region in Europe and that's really important because if you know the heat demand in every kilometer squared region then you can measure the heat density so how much heat is being consumed in this small area and if you have enough of these area beside one another that's how you decide you should build a district heating system the heat is high enough in these areas to justify putting a pipe that connects them together and what I've... the guys in this team I asked them to get some numbers in Ireland and if you compare Danish conditions with Irish conditions they've estimated that about 30-40% of the heat demand in Ireland is in areas that Denmark would have defined as suitable for district heating and the heat density in Ireland is high enough in enough areas that we could convert about 30-40% of our heat demand to district heating if I zoom into Dublin on that heat atlas you can see that there's different colors for each square kilometer that represents the heat demand in that heat atlas and basically anything that's dark orange would be very likely suitable for district heating development the good news is that I no longer have to rely on my own work for these type of results fortunately Dublin City Council and Codema, I can see Donna's here today so you can pick on her if you have any questions about this has already developed an even more detailed heat atlas than we have made in heat roadmap Europe for Dublin City Council only but it's still a very, very good detailed heat atlas where they've gone down to even building our district levels about what the heat demands are and the conclusion from that study was that about 75% of the heat demands in Dublin City are in areas suitable for district heating development so I think this is a growing area where we're seeing more and more evidence starting to appear about what could be possible in an Irish context I'm going to finish with one final slide about why I'm so animated you could say about starting here and that's not necessarily because I am fascinated with pipes are kind of a putting in more infrastructure in the streets or anything but it's to do with how we supply our district heating systems and the whole concept of district heating is that it uses heat that we're throwing away to heat the buildings so in other words when you produce electricity you get a heat that you waste and instead of simply throwing that away you put it in these pipes and then you heat the buildings so you don't have to get something else to heat the buildings and if you look at the work that Kodima did they estimated that about four terawatt hours was the heat demand in Dublin City if we look at the three power stations we see in our work in heat roadmap Europe we estimated that if they operated as CHP plants they would be able to produce around five terawatt hours in other words we could simply use the excess heat from this electricity generation to replace all of the natural gas we consume in Dublin City and that is based on proven technology which has existed for 40 to 50 years and that's why I see this as a very good starting point to begin this transition to 100% renewable energy systems proven technology previous experiences not far from our doorstep I also like to give you the good news from my perspective that this is something we've been trying to inform the Commission about because there's huge potentials not just in Ireland but in many other cities around Europe to do this and I'm glad to say that in the first ever heating and cooling strategy developed by the Commission they have put on page one in the first sentence district heating as a key technology now for decarbonisation over the next 30 to 40 years so if we don't see this as an option for ourselves it might not be the two distant future that we might see it coming from Brussels as an option also that then brings me to my final three conclusions which I won't go into in too much more detail I've already gone through the first four and the last three are basically saying let's start using what we can already see happening in other places