45126-Invest. Qual-No111

Investment in Qualityrelieve congestion on the east coast, in the Greater Dublin Area inparticular, as well as improvements in power delivery to the North-West and reinforcement of the level of interconnection withNorthern Ireland. These developments should help to overcomesome of the deficiency in transmission infrastructure and possibleconstraints on industrial location. The Council recognises that oneof the greatest impediments to the delivery of the necessarytransmission infrastructure has been the need for planningpermission and associated requirements, and that the streamliningof the process for major infrastructural projects of nationalimportance, and the criteria by which they are assessed, must be revisited.The Council returns to the issue of planning forinfrastructure below.The year 2002 marked the introduction of a new era in electricitysupply in Ireland, with the first connection to Great Britain, albeitindirectly through the Moyle interconnector between Scotland andNorthern Ireland. This opens much greater supply opportunities inan industry where, as noted above, economies of scale are of greatimportance. Studies are being undertaken to look at integration ofthe market in the Republic of Ireland with Northern Ireland and atthe possibility of connecting Ireland’s system to that of Wales. TheCouncil encourages the exploration of these possibilities andwelcomes the fact that European funding has been made availableunder the Trans European Networks (TENs) programme to takeaccount of Ireland’s peripheral position in the Single EuropeanElectricity Market.In addition to these investments at the macro level, there is a €1.5bnprogramme of work underway on the electricity distributionnetwork. This includes the ongoing programme of rural networkrenewal and the conversion from 10kV to 20kV. A significantincentive mechanism has been introduced by the regulator to reducethe number of Customer Minutes Lost through interruptions tosupply. This is planned to deliver a targeted reduction of almost 40per cent from (2000 levels) by 2005 and a focus on the quality ofsupply for the customers most prone to interruption.Transparency has also been improved with the requirement under the468