The rooftop revolution is happening. It’s evident in every town and every suburb of the country. A few years ago, it would be unusual to see solar panels on somebody’s roof but now they are everywhere, on new builds and on older homes. We’ve seen a big shift in installation particularly since we made the move last May to reduce the VAT rate on the supply and installation of solar panels to zero for private dwellings.

This year, we also announced the solar for business plan with new broader grants for businesses to switch. I made the announcement with Minister Simon Coveney, Minister for Enterprise Trade and Employment, with a photo-call at The Back Page pub in Phibsborough, where they are already making their pizzas and powering the popular bar on Dublin’s Northside with solar.

Grants ranging from €2,700 to €162,200 are now available to help businesses from corner shops to large industrial factories to install solar panels, a move which could cut up to 30% off the cost to a business of installing solar.

This comes on top of generous grants for farmers who have access to a 60% grant under TAMS III for solar PV systems that generate electricity for their farms and farmhouses.

Back in April 2022, I opened the country’s first grid-scale solar farm close to Ashford in County Wicklow. The Millvale Solar Farm occupies 25 hectares and has 33,600 solar modules – enough to power approximately 3,600 homes every year and avoiding 4,800 tonnes in CO2 emissions. Since then, other similar grid-scale solar parks have opened with many more planned, including a solar farm to power Croke Park I believe!

Last year (2022) at the Green Party convention I said that we were setting a target to generate 5 GW of energy from solar power by 2025. I believe we are well on the way to this, and then to meeting our target of 8 GW of solar power by 2030, as set out in the Climate Action Plan.

The future for solar looks really bright. 

In November 2023, we have just launched the solar for schools programme which will see up to 4,000 schools get 6V of solar power on their roofs over the coming year.