Get all the very latest news in Dublin straight to your email every single day Sign Up! Thank you for subscribing See our privacy notice Invalid Email

Green Party leader Eamon Ryan has unveiled an ambitious plan to have solar panels on home rooftops across the country.

Mr Ryan has already held initial talks with State regulator Eirgrid about bringing about the radical change in electricity supply.

And the Green Party chief has discovered that the plan to install solar panels on the 700,000 suitable homes would deliver 5% of our energy needs under the plan to go 100% renewable by 2050.

The total cost has not been calculated yet, but seeing as the price of solar panels has fallen by approximately 80% in recent years, the price for the ambitious project would be coming down all the time.

Mr Ryan was speaking from the Metropole Hotel in Cork at the Green Party’s pre-Dáil think-in.

Spirits were high as the Greens are currently riding on a wave that saw them quadruple their number of councillors to 57 in the local elections - and return 2 MEPs to the European Parliament where they had none in the last session.

(Image: Gareth Chaney Collins)

Mr Ryan told the Irish Mirror: “The solar panels plan is eminently doable.

“I asked Eirgrid, which runs our transmissions system, they’re a very good company, we’re not bad at things like this, we’re actually good at it, the way you integrate renewables into a grid.

“We’re one of the leading countries in the world, partly because the Greens were in Government 10 years ago.

“I asked them (Eirgrid) what can we get from this.

“They came back to me and said 700,000 houses, not all of them, if you did the same on the barns, the same on the office buildings, rooftop, community-owned."

He added: “We can do this best by not just going into one house on a street, but going down the entire street, do it as a community, so the cost is much lower, so the contractor knows that there will be 100 jobs to do.

“He can employ people for a good length of time and he could bring the cost down.

“Do it as a community-type project.

“If we did that we’d get about 5% renewable power out of our total demand.

“That’s a useful chunk in our battle to get to 100% renewable in the next two to three decades as part of our climate transition.”