The grant for households installing rooftop solar panels will remain in place for the lifetime of the current Government, the Minister for Climate, Energy and the Environment Darragh O’Brien has pledged.
The grant was introduced in 2021 to encourage homes to install solar panels. Today it is worth up to €1,800.
Minister O’Brien made the commitment while addressing the annual conference of industry representative body Solar Ireland, which welcomed the announcement.
“The continued availability of the rooftop solar grant provides important certainty for households considering investing in solar,” said Solar CEO Ronan Power. “Today’s announcement is welcome news for households across the country and demonstrates the Government’s continued support for enabling greater public participation in Ireland’s energy transition.”
It came after Solar Ireland’s annual ‘Scale of Solar 2026’ report said the country’s solar capacity has jumped almost 300% since 2023.
The report shows that, in the 12 months to the end of May, the equivalent of 460,000 homes were powered by Ireland’s total connected solar capacity.
During the same period, Ireland added 1 gigawatt of solar capacity.
1 gigawatt can power around 10 million 100 watt lightbulbs or around 100 million low energy LED lights.
Speaking on RTÉ’s Morning Ireland, Mr Power said by the end of the year solar will have about 3 gigawatts of connected capacity, while wind currently has around 5 gigawatts.
“In real terms that means over the last four years we’ve gone from effective standing start in the solar industry to get to that scale and the climate action target set for 2030 put the sector to try and drive towards 8 gigawatts,” Ronan Power said..
“So all indicators would say that with the current run rate that we have, that we’re likely to get to that 8 gigawatts and become an even more significant part of the Irish energy and the Irish energy mix,” he said.
The solar sector’s lobby group CEO said that they have seen a rise in demand residential solar as a result of the conflict in the Middle East.
However he noted that the demand has been there for quite some time.
“I think demand is being driven by an electrification strategy where we’re trying to decarbonise our electrical infrastructure here in Ireland,” said Mr Power.
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“We’ve seen a steady, large rollout of solar over the last number of years,” he said.
“We have seen a peak over the last number of months due to the conflict, but I think mostly because people are looking at potential energy shock as a result of that, imported gas, and trying to take a little bit of control back into their own lives around generating their own electricity,” he added.
Wind is still the biggest renewable contributor to the Irish electricity supply at 40%, but solar was at 3% in 2025 up from 2% the previous year.
Despite the growth in solar and renewables electricity prices are still rising.
This is down to how the wholesale market is set up and how the gas price set the price of power within Ireland, according to Mr Power.
“We’ve seen changes made around gas price input caps around Europe, which have helped reduce the price of power, Spain being a good example,” he explained, “and there we’ve seen a reduction of potentially 24%”.
“We need to be looking a little bit forward now around a market reform so that we can actually really get the benefits as we start to deploy more domestic led, solar and even wind generation here,” he added.
