Irish Small-Scale Solar Tracker

Tracking small-scale (mostly rooftop) solar electricity generation from homes and businesses in Ireland

Live Electricity Production ⓘ

Microgeneration refers to small-scale solar panel systems (like on the roof of your home). Here's the estimated combined production of such systems today in Ireland

Value of Electricity Generated ⓘ

Households, businesses, and other organisations save money on their electricity bills by having solar panels installed. On top of this, they can also earn money by selling surplus electricity from their solar panels to the grid. Here's the approximate combined value of those savings and export payments over recent months and years. The benefits vary substantially between seasons.

Monthly

Annual

Uptake of Small-Scale Solar in Ireland

Solar Energy County Leaderboard

Solar Energy Forecast ⓘ

The forecast refers to the available solar energy in the selected area (on a "horizontal plane"). Electricity production also depends on the number, size, efficiency, and orientation of your solar panels.

About

This section contains background about the data sources and assumptions used in the dashboard.

General

Microgeneration refers to small solar PV systems (up to 50kW).

This dashboard gives estimates about such systems in Ireland (26 counties).

Data Accuracy

The data shown on this dashboard are estimates and may change as we incorporate additional data sources and refine our calculations.

Current Data Sources

Number and capacity of systems installed (to 1^st October 2024): ESB Networks

Retrofit installations by year/quarter: SEAI retrofit reports

Solar radiation forecasts (also used for today's live production estimates): Open Meteo (CC BY 4.0)

Solar radiation data (historical monthly totals): Met Éireann

Electricity prices for households: CSO

Solar PV capacity in Ireland pre-2019 (29MW): Energy Ireland

Household solar PV system sizes: National BER Research Tool

Bonus (number of PV systems installed by 2012, not used directly in calculations) Renewable Energy in Ireland 2012 (SEAI)

Current Key Assumptions and Simplifications

Trend in installation sizes extrapolated from BER Assessment data, and then scaled according to ESB Networks data

All panels modeled as horizontal (this is a reasonable approximation for a mixture containing a variety of orientations)

Solar panel productivity assumed to be equal across counties (simplification)

Installation numbers are extrapolated forward based on the latest known installation rate

Installation numbers are assumed to be spread equally across days in each quarterly period

The proportion of installations which are grant-aided is assumed to be the same across different years

Radiation forecasts timepoints are hourly on the hour. We use linear interpolation for estimates between these times

Electricity value based on the rates paid by large household consumers from CSO data. For years without CSO data available, we estmated these using linear regeression with the previous year's wholesale electrcity prices as the predictor variable (values with a * in the table below)