Ireland’s Minister for Communications, Climate Action and Environment has launched the pilot scheme for PV microgeneration, which it promised to issue by the end of this summer, in January.
Minister, Denis Naughten said that through the new scheme, a typical three bed semi-detached house would spend about €1,800 on a solar panel system, and would save approximately €220 per year on their electricity bills.
The grant aided scheme is intended to help residential customers install rooftop PV arrays for self-consumption. “The pilot scheme will be subject to a 6 month review at which time the costs of installation will be assessed and further opportunities to broaden this scheme to other groups and other technologies will be explored,” Naughten said.
That the scheme would be developed in a multi-phased implementation of supports was communicated by Naughten already in January. He added now, however, that grants for home battery storage may also be considered at a later stage.
The scheme for microgeneration is being defined outside the RESS program, which is instead being conceived to provide support for large-scale renewables through a competitive bidding process.
Ireland has currently only a very limited amount of installed PV capacity. Both programs may spur larger growth over the coming years, especially in utility-scale solar plants.
Based on the applications for grid connection at the end of 2017, Ireland had a pipeline of around 6 GW of PV capacity, with the majority of projects concentrated in the south and the east of the country.
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