Both Epower and Viridian, formerly Northern Ireland Electricity, have claimed they will take 40 per cent of the newly liberalised electricity market. Epower chairman Mr Leslie Buckley said that the company will undercut the ESB's prices for commercial customers by 10 to 15 per cent when the market opens on February 19th and was willing to take a long-term loss to make an impact on the market.

Mr Buckley said: "We've spoken to a lot of customers and have got a tremendously positive reaction. A lot of customers [industrial] are interested and within the next 12 months we would be aiming at getting 40 per cent of the market."

Epower is made up of a consortium involving Mr Denis O'Brien and GPU, who are investing £200 million each in the venture, with plans for the construction of a 390 megawatt generating plant near Navan. Mr Buckley called for the liberalisation of the entire market by 2003 and said that both the national grid and the transportation network should be unbundled immediately.

He said the ESB/Statoil consortium, which is planning a generating station at Ringsend in Dublin, should be disqualified from accessing the remaining gas supply because it was not an independent venture.

Mr Buckley said that the ESB already had a major advantage, with the size of its capital resources, and that the gas supply should be reserved for two independent players if the market was to be really liberalised.

Viridian - which obtained planning permission on Wednesday for a new generating station in Huntstown, Co Dublin - did not reveal what kind of price reductions it would offer. But Mr Michael McKernan, general manager of Viridian Power Resources, said the company would not be going out to buy customers by offering prices that were unsustainable in the long term. He said the company would aim at gaining 40 per cent of the market by the winter of 2002.

Mr McKernan said that the consortium had agreements with customers which were ready to be signed once the wholesale charges became available and that the ESB would not be able to hold on to its share of the market because of its capacity constraints.

The company is taking a long-term view of over 15 years and is hoping to build up a supply business before its generating plant comes on stream in three years' time.

Mr McKernan insisted that 10 new power stations would not be built, even though 10 consortiums had declared their intention to enter the market. It would boil down to three or four players at the end of the day. He rejected suggestions that Viridian might use its dominant position in Northern Ireland to dump surplus electricity on the Republic's market.