Renewable energy developer and operator SSE Renewables is submitting a planning application this week for a 21MW solar farm, which it plans to build next to its existing Richfield wind farm in Wexford.
SSE Renewables first announced its plans to develop the solar farm in January. It would be composed of ground-mounted solar photovoltaic (PV) panels up to 3m in height, on a 44-hectare site in the townlands of Hooks and Yoletown in south Wexford.
The renewables developer owns a portfolio of almost 700MW of operational onshore wind farms, the largest on the island, with a development pipeline of a further 1.3GW of projects across offshore wind, onshore wind, solar and batteries.
The proposed solar farm location is adjacent to the existing 18 turbine Richfield wind farm which has been in operation since 2006, and can generate enough renewable energy to power up to 18,000 homes annually.
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The solar plan is SSE Renewables’s first co-located solar project. The company said that the hybrid co-located development could increase the typical annual renewable energy output from Richfield by about 25 per cent, enough to power an additional 4,500 homes annually.
In addition to increasing the renewable energy output from Richfield, SSE Renewables has said the combined wind and solar asset would be “more productive and resilient”, capable of contributing power to Ireland’s grid at times when the sun shines but when the wind does not blow.
The solar farm would have a hybrid grid connection with Richfield, with development of the project subject to changes to the State’s current grid connection consenting regime to facilitate co-location of wind and solar generation sources.
Currently, it is possible to obtain a hybrid connection to the national grid, meaning the connection of a mix of different forms of generation assets such as wind, solar or battery through a single point. However, it is only possible where a single legal entity owns all generation assets connected at the same point, as current rules operate on the basis of one customer per connection.
SSE Renewables has said that the current policy on hybrid connections in Ireland leads to an “inefficient use of grid capacity”, as it requires solar and wind portions of a hybrid site to each have dedicated grid capacity reserved at all times, and “currently no process exists for dual-technologies to dynamically share and export from a single grid connection”.
The Government’s latest Climate Action Plan, published in December last year, has tasked the Commission for Regulation of Utilities, with assistance from EirGrid and ESB Networks, with ensuring that hybrid technology grid connections are facilitated on the national electricity grid, and remaining barriers removed, by the fourth quarter of 2023.
Garry Brides, senior project manager at SSE Renewables, said that if co-located projects such as Richfield Solar are to help deliver Ireland’s climate goals, “industry will require more certainty as to how the regulatory framework will be evolved to support these developments”.
“At present, we lack the necessary policy to underpin these kinds of hybrid technology grid connections,” he said.
“We stand ready to work closely with key Government and regulatory stakeholders to remove any remaining barriers to the delivery of hybrid connections, and so support the delivery of important solar and battery technology projects co-located at wind farm sites,” he added.
The planning application being submitted to Wexford County Council this week follows a period of local public consultation on the project, which took place earlier this year.
The developer has said that should the project secure all its consents and progress to delivery, 15 per cent of the site area will be planted with native woodland species, as per SSE Renewables’s biodiversity net gain targets and requirements of the Wexford County Development Plan 2022-2028.
SSE Renewables said that delivery of the project is subject to securing an economic route to market (appropriate remuneration for the purchase of power generated at the site) in advance of a final investment decision expected around early 2026.
