The roll-out of renewable energy generation is needs to be accelerated to hit Climate Action Plan targets, according to a report from the Climate Change Advisory Council.
Shallon Solar Farm Limited, a subsidiary of solar company Grianworks, has applied for planning permission to build an 85-hectare solar farm at Shallon in the Ward in north county Dublin.
If it is built, the panels would produce enough renewable electricity to power about 25,000 homes in the region, according to a planning document.
As yet there aren't any commercial solar farms in County Dublin, says Fei Wang, an analyst with the Green Collective, which tracks renewable energy supply in Ireland. But there are some other planning applications pending, she said.
There is a lot of solar farm activity in Co. Meath, Wang said. But “obviously, land is very precious in Dublin and with solar farms, you do need a certain amount of land”.
Renewables in Ireland make up around 35 percent to 40 percent of electricity supply, Wang said, but most of that energy production is from wind turbines, often in the west and southwest of Ireland, where it is windiest.
“But a lot of demand is in Dublin. So you need to get that energy into Dublin, which creates a lot of congestion issues,” she says.
On Wednesday, standing in front of a small house on the R121 in Shallon, Pat Farnham said he didn't have a problem with the plans for the solar farm.
"A lot of people won't like it," Farnham said, "but I don't think it'll make that much of a difference to me."
One submission to the planning application, from Séan Costello, says that the project site ends 30m away from his home.
“The development would have a serious and unacceptable impact on my residential amenity, visual outlook, rural setting, and safety,” he said. He said it shouldn’t be allowed for a number of reasons, including because the area is in a greenbelt.
The Fingal County Council development plan lists things that are allowed and are not allowed in the greenbelt. Solar panels are not mentioned in either category.
Cork County Council previously knocked back an application for a solar farm in a greenbelt, but An Coimisiún Pleanála overturned that decision and allowed the solar farm to go ahead.
Wang, the analyst with the Green Collective, said it is good to produce green energy close to where there is high electricity demand as the energy is less likely to be wasted.
“It's good to get renewables closer to the demand, so that the energy doesn't get lost in a sense,” she says by phone on Thursday.
Sometimes the grid has to refuse renewable energy because at peak production times it doesn’t have the capacity to accept all the energy that is being produced, says Wang.
Producing the electricity closer to where it will be used helps to ease that problem, says Wang.
This application includes battery storage too, she says. That has only been approved for use recently and is a smart addition, she says. “Honestly, solar plus storage is more economically sensible,” she says.
Wang says the first commercial solar farms in Ireland were connected to the grid in 2022. Since then, solar has taken off.
During peak solar production, on a sunny day in summer, around 35 percent of electricity supply on the grid could come from solar farms at one point in time, she says, “which is quite impressive compared to other places, and we only started a few years ago to really get these solar farms online”.
In July this year, around 8 percent of electricity used in Ireland throughout the month came from solar power, she says.
Although, that drops off in winter, so overall throughout 2025 around 2.8 per cent of electricity on the island of Ireland came from solar farms, says Wang.
Those figures don’t include the solar electricity that people produce themselves to supply their homes, farms and businesses.
The location of the proposed solar farm is in the townlands of Shallon, Broghan and Bishopswood, which is part of a green belt, according to Fingal County Council maps.
Costello said in his observation to the planning application that the development “would industrialise a rural area, erode the open character of the greenbelt, and impose an intense utility-scale energy installation immediately beside long-established homes and farm holdings”.
Farnham said he has lived in the area for 50 years and he might prefer a solar farm to the existing agricultural use.
The house and its garden are surrounded by a hedgerow and trees that block the view of the vast farm field beyond that would be covered with solar panels.
Farnham said he doesn't think the solar farm will be that visible behind this green wall. "And at least the field won't be getting ploughed up anymore and dust everywhere," he said
In his observation, Costello also flagged concerns about potential glare from the panels.
The company's own glint and glare assessment says that it doesn't expect "any significant reflectance or hazard effects generated from glint and glare".
But independent Councillor Joe Newman said by email that he thinks glare could be an issue. “There is a glint and glare from these arrays,” he says.
Newman says he is against the building of solar farms in the green belt. “I think they are a blight on the landscape and are used by companies for greenwashing,” he says. “I think the gain from solar is minimal and in time will need to be replaced, which means more material for dumping or recycling.”
Ireland reached 7.7GW of renewable generation capacity at the end of 2025 and 1.1GW of that came from grid-scale solar.
But the roll-out needs to speed up even more, said a May 2026 report from the Climate Change Advisory Council.
Only 0.6 GW of new solar capacity and 0.2 GW of new wind capacity were added in 2025, "far less than the 2 GW that needs to be added each year until 2030 to hit Climate Action Plan targets", it says.
The company's application includes preliminary results of its assessments of the environmental impacts of raising the cap from 32 million to 40 million passengers per year.
The focus of talk to date has been of the need for the big private and public-sector anchor tenants in the Docklands, to support viability.
The plans envision it as a park, not a site for housing. Environmental monitoring reports detail its impacts on surface water and ground water, as well as the gases it is emitting.
"It seems very very small indeed," said Fine Gael Councillor Declan Flanagan, chair of Dublin City Council's climate action committee.
