Ireland’s first solar farm under the Government’s Small-Scale Renewable Energy Support Scheme (SRESS) has commenced operation.<\/p>\n
Flogas, a DCC Energy plc company, has announced it is partnering with Meadhill Solar Farm.<\/p>\n
The 650kW facility in Meadstown, Kildorrery, Co Cork, features more than 1,000 solar panels across 1.5 acres and generates enough electricity to power 150 local households annually, the company said.<\/p>\n
It was independently developed by farmer Sean Keating and installed by PV Generation.<\/p>\n
Flogas said it will provide a long-term route to market for the renewable electricity generated by the farm through a 15-year power purchase agreement.<\/p>\n
“Our role is to provide the commercial certainty that gives projects like this a route to market and helps unlock the investment needed to bring them forward,” said managinf director of Flogas Energy, Ken O’Byrne.<\/p>\n
“We see significant potential for this model to support more farmers, SMEs and independent renewable developers across rural Ireland.”<\/p>\n
SRESS was launched last year and covers projects that produce between 50kW and 6MW of electricity.<\/p>\n
It guarantees payments for the electricity produced.<\/p>\n
Minister for Climate, Energy and the Environment, Darragh O\u2019Brien, said that it’s “an important part of our strategy to increase renewable electricity generation across Ireland”.<\/p>\n
“As Ireland works towards our climate and renewable energy targets, projects like this will have an important role to play in expanding our renewable generation capacity and supporting a more sustainable energy system.”<\/p>\n
Farmer Sean Keating said he started working on the project in 2017 to “devirsify the farm’s income”.<\/p>\n
He added that “bringing it to life required significant work across planning, the ESB grid connection and financing”.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Ireland’s first solar farm under the Government’s Small-Scale Renewable Energy Support Scheme (SRESS) has commenced operation. Flogas, a…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":785637,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[22],"tags":[1397,90,56,54,55],"class_list":["post-785636","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-environment","tag-environment","tag-science","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom","tag-unitedkingdom"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/785636","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=785636"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/785636\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/785637"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=785636"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=785636"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=785636"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}