Planned cuts to grants for solar panels have been reversed, with Minister for Climate Darragh O’Brien saying he wanted to continue driving the “rooftop revolution”.
Households can get a grant of €1,800 from the Sustainable Energy Authority of Ireland to install rooftop panels but this was due to begin reducing by €300 a year from January 1st.
Mr O’Brien said on Monday he had given instructions for the grant not to be touched.
He said 155,000 homes, farms and businesses now had rooftop panels and he wanted to keep the momentum going.
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“People have responded to the grants. They work and they won’t be reduced,” he said.
“Solar’s flying and we need to keep going.”
Solar power has increased dramatically in the last three years and there is now two gigawatts worth of electricity generation capacity on rooftops and in large-scale solar parks.
That compares to five gigawatts of wind turbines that have taken three decades to build up.
Despite progress in clean electricity, however, the Minister said Ireland would not meet its target of having 80 per cent of all electricity produced by renewables by 2030.
“We’ll be close and I see us hitting that target in the early 2030s,” he said.
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The country will not meet its target of reducing greenhouse gas emissions by 51 per cent by 2030 either, but he said that would also happen within a few years of the deadline.
New ‘carbon budgets’ and ‘sectoral emission ceilings’ are due to be drawn up by the end of this year to set limits on the amount of greenhouse gas emissions each sector of society and the economy can produce from 2026-2030.
Mr O’Brien said that deadline would not be met and it was expected the work would be complete and brought to Government early next year.
Mr O’Brien spoke in Belém, Brazil where he is attending the Cop30 climate summit.
He said Ireland was supporting the push by a growing number of countries to agree a ‘roadmap’ for removing fossil fuels from use across the world.
At Cop28 in Dubai, countries agreed to “transition away” from fossil fuels but no targets were set and little progress has been made.
He said a roadmap would need to be a “to do list” with practical guidance on how to achieve the Cop28 goal but he said there was pushback against it.
The issue is one of the tricky issues the summit is left to resolve before its scheduled conclusion on Friday.
In the dispute between Turkey and Australia over the hosting of Cop31, Mr O’Brien said Ireland was supporting the latter because of the focus Australia would bring on the plight of small island states in the Pacific.
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