Solar Panels.

Widget

I have a holiday home near Louisburgh in Co Mayo. It is a large site and 1/3rd of it is boggy and not much use to us. My wife suggested we look into setting up some panels there to see if we could make a few Euro selling back to the grid. I think we could easily have 20 to 30 panels. We could afford the initial outlay ourselves but wonder if it is possible? Is planning permission required? Would we be able to find out roughly how much energy we could expect to generate? Would payments for electricity be taxable? What would be the next steps to take the idea further? Thanks for your advice

You'll want to have a read of this thread

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/2058094040/pv-feed-in-tariff

KCross

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/2058209525/solar-panels

to see if we could make a few Euro selling back to the grid

The answer to that will likely be no.

You will get some money back but unless you are using the majority of it yourself to offset your own daytime usage it would be a fools errand to stick up all those panels in an effort to make money. The primary goal should be to offset your own usage and then the money you get back from the grid would be icing on the cake to reduce your time to break even on the initial outlay.

Is the holiday home extensively used during the summer months? Have you high daytime usage during those months?

Widget

Not used a lot to be honest, we normally live in the South of England. On our roof there although we only have 8 panels facing SW, they are a nice little earner for us. I thought if we could something similar in Ireland it could be a win win!

KCross

I’d definitely hold fire until they announce the terms of the FiT and then run the numbers.

At the moment you get nothing for export in Ireland

graememk

https://re.jrc.ec.europa.eu/pvg_tools/en/#PVP

That gives an accurate estimate of yearly generation.

There is also an esb limit of 6kw on the inverter side, (you can oversize the array though and people have more than 6kw but limited their export to 6kw, - that's a bit of a grey area)

All of this is moot, as mentioned above there is no feed in tariff currently.

Rumours are that it will be about 5c but that's just speculation.

jkforde

Monthlyrad_53.422_-9.038_undefined_2005-2016_S.png

thanks, very good tool, nice to get a visualisation of historical irradiance at my location (it even accepts eircode!).. it'd be interesting to see a trend going back to the 70s, apparently it's gotten a lot cloudier since early 70s.