Solar Power is a rapidly growing sector of Ireland’s renewable electricity capacity, and no small part of that comes from rooftop solar panels on homes and businesses.

Rooftop solar has none on the long term planning and bureaucratic hurdles which comes with solar or wind farms, and is more affordable than ever.

The Irish Solar Energy Association showed that by June of last year more than 94,000 homes in the country had installed solar panels, a figure that only ballooned in the second half of the year.

In 2024 alone the SEAI recorded more than 28,000 homes in Ireland which installed solar panels with the aid of the Solar PV grant.

That’s 28,000 homes which are producing much of their own electricity, likely more than half.

However, there is a gap in that grant’s availability. Only houses which were built and occupied before 2021 are eligible for the grant.

In that time 21,119 single houses, 57,512 houses in multi-unit schemes, and 34,678 apartments have been built.

That’s 78,631 houses alone which do not qualify for the solar panels grant, but are most likely to also have electricity as their main heating source.

The growing adoption of electric cars will also see domestic electricity usage increase substantially as people charge their EV at home primarily in order to get the best price.

For both of those reasons it is in homeowners best interests to generate as much of their own electricity as possible.

What we want to know is do you think it should be required by law to put solar panels on all new build homes, houses and apartment blocks when they are built?