Press Release

Dulas secures planning permission for Irish PV project within eight weeks

Local authority’s heritage and environmental concerns were assuaged at the first attempt, ensuring lightning fast preparations for next year’s auction scheme.
Dulas
Welsh renewable energy consultancy Dulas has, through its work for a major European utility, secured planning permission for a 6 MW solar farm in County Limerick, in western Ireland and secured planning permission in just eight weeks.

With the forthcoming implementation of Ireland’s Renewable Electricity Support Scheme (RESS) next year, developers and utilities are seeking to position projects to prepare for a competitive auction. By ensuring early-stage project planning and design conforms to the highest standards – avoiding requests for further information that cause project delays – and by successfully securing a prompt planning permission, Dulas has ensured its client is in a position to enter its project for an early auction, and can capitalize early on a swift commercial timeline.
Drawing on its heritage of design and planning experience in the Irish market, this latest project from Dulas maintains the firm’s 100% success rate in securing planning permissions for clients, having previously worked with Irish domestic solar developers and alongside international utilities.
The project, if successful at auction, would see 6 MW of solar capacity installed on a site at which there were several challenging planning constraints, and working within the Shannon Estuary special protection area and nearby heritage features. Through considered solar farm design, Dulas resolved such issues sufficiently to assuage county council concerns and secure planning permission within the statutory decision period.
“As the Irish solar market gears up for tariff support in 2019, there is the demand for projects to be ‘right first time’ when they are submitted for planning,” said Michael Phillips, Principal Consultant for Dulas. “Without that, such is the pressure from competing projects and the limitations of the grid, it becomes very difficult to move forward to successful financial close.”
“Having now worked on [more than] 100 MW of solar projects in Ireland, we’re aware of the key facets that can determine the success of a project in the planning phase, and it’s that experience that we’re now seeing requested from our developer clients in the race to build shovel-ready projects countrywide.”
Dulas anticipates the project could see construction late next year.