Soleire Renewables has reached the final energisation phase of the Erkina Solar Park near Roscrea, County Tipperary, Ireland's largest solar project to date and a marker of how quickly brownfield bogland sites can be converted into utility-scale renewable generation once planning and grid connection are secured. The €130 million, roughly 600-acre site is expected to power approximately 37,000 average Irish homes and cut around 105,000 tonnes of CO2 emissions annually once fully operational.

Soleire Renewables is a Roscrea-based solar developer founded in 2014, with a portfolio of seven Irish solar projects totalling around 900MW, developed in partnership with German independent power producer ILOS Energy.

ILOS Energy is a Karlsruhe, Germany-headquartered independent power producer with a 4.5GWp solar portfolio across seven European countries, majority owned by AXA IM Alts.

PJ McCarthy, managing director of Soleire Renewables, said: "Soleire Renewables is delighted to announce that the Erkina Solar Farm has reached its final energisation phase. This significant milestone will see the project export green electricity to the national grid, improve Ireland's energy security and help the country reach its sustainability targets."

Erkina is one of two large Soleire-ILOS projects reaching milestones within months of each other: ILOS separately secured €143 million in debt financing from Danske Bank for a 217MW solar farm in Ballyhea, County Cork, indicating the partnership is scaling a repeatable development and financing model rather than delivering a single flagship site.

That model rests on European institutional capital: ILOS is majority owned by AXA IM Alts, which is backing an ambitious pipeline across seven European solar markets, giving Soleire's Irish projects a well-capitalised backer less exposed to single-project financing risk than smaller independent developers.

Erkina's dual land use, over half the site already hosts an operating wind farm at Monaincha, also demonstrates how Irish developers are increasingly co-locating generation technologies on the same footprint to reduce the land and grid connection costs that have slowed other utility-scale projects.

For the sector, a nearly 600-acre former peat extraction site reaching energisation on schedule offers a rare positive data point on delivery speed at a moment when Ireland's broader renewable buildout is widely reported to be lagging its 2030 targets.

Source: Ireland Live / Silicon Republic