Dr. Tara Reale:

We are seeing this becoming more and more of a major issue. If we look back to when the threshold was initially implemented, which, I believe, was 2017, we can see that the trend in Ireland followed that in the UK and Northern Ireland, where it was for these small, community-sized solar farms that generated 4 MW or 5 MW peak. For such operations, probably a maximum of only 20, 30 or 40 acres of land was needed. Then there could be a situation where one landowner could conceivably have 80 acres or where there could be two landowners who, between them, would not be impacted. It could also be the case that there are a lot of sites.

We must consider how policy has now changed since then. In order to get grid access, especially from EirGrid, a project must be large-scale in nature. This is also in the context of the economics. Members will appreciate that - as is the case with everything one buys - the more one buys, the cheaper per megawatt the actual cost. This has driven developers towards these large-scale farms. Then there is the whole process of finding grid and the need to take into account all of the other planning considerations, including those relating to visual impact, special areas of conservation, heritage issues and so forth. In that context, you are quite limited in where you could conceivably put a solar farm. If you speak to landowners, if they are interested - many of them are because of diversification of income, wanting to retire or the fact that their children are not interested in farming - if their neighbours are also willing to go in on the project, again, this is on the proviso that those neighbours have land that is appropriate from a topographical point of view, you are often in a situation where there are perhaps 150 acres or 160 acres of land. This may seem like a very large amount of land. It is, especially if it is a large farm or collection of farms, but it is not really sufficient in many instances. It depends on how you are connecting into the grid. We would have say to the farmer involved that there would be no point in us optioning the land because it would be highly likely that the project would never get off the ground because the economics would not work. We would tell them that we would be doing them a disservice by having the land under option. We have had to turn away a number of opportunities where people were extremely eager to get into solar energy because we just could not make the economics work.

We have a number of projects in development at present. They are a bit more marginal, and we are happy to keep investing in them. We have done some basic scenario analysis to see if we could take 50% of their land versus 60%, 70%, 80% and so on. Based on one particular project, having a typical hurdle rate, bidding into an auction and having the benefit of 80% of someone's land versus 50% of the land, that translates to €12.50 per megawatt hour of cost to the consumer in the renewable electricity support scheme, RESS, auction, which is a sizeable amount.