Solar Carports in Waterford: How Our Car Parks Could Power 100+ Homes Each

Drive past any supermarket, retail park, hospital or business park in Waterford and you’ll see acres of tarmac doing one job: holding cars. Cover those car parks with solar canopies and the same land could generate clean electricity for the region, right beside the buildings that use it, without touching a single field.

The land is already there

Ireland’s solar debate usually ends up in the same place: farmland. Large ground-mounted solar farms need planning, grid connections and fields that could otherwise grow food or be used for housing. Car parks avoid all of that. They are already developed, already sealed, already beside a grid connection, and usually right next to a building with a big daytime electricity bill.

Waterford is full of them. Think of the supermarket and retail park car parks around Waterford city, the hospital and business park sites, and the shopping and leisure car parks in Dungarvan, Tramore and towns right across the county. Every one of them could carry a roof of solar panels, known as a solar carport or solar canopy, over the parking bays.

How much power could one car park make?

Here’s a rough, real-world sum for a typical 200-space car park:

• System size: about 2.5 kWp of panels per space, so roughly 500 kWp in total.
• Annual generation: in the South East, a well-designed system produces around 850 to 950 kWh per kWp a year. That works out at roughly 420,000 to 470,000 kWh a year.
• What that means: a typical Irish home uses about 4,200 kWh of electricity a year, so one car park could produce the equivalent of more than 100 homes’ worth of electricity.

Now multiply that across every large car park in the county. You can try your own numbers with our solar carport calculator.

Why it suits businesses

A solar carport makes power when shops, offices and hospitals need it most: during the day. That means most of the electricity can be used on site instead of being exported cheaply to the grid, which is where the real savings are. There are other benefits too:

• Shelter for customers and staff from rain and summer sun.
• EV charging can be built in, powered directly by the panels overhead.
• Battery storage can hold surplus power for the evening.
• A visible green statement for brands that want to show they’re serious about energy.

Businesses, farms, schools, community groups and public bodies can apply for the SEAI Non-Domestic Microgen Grant, which supports solar systems up to 1 MW with grants of up to €162,600. The grant rate was temporarily raised to about 45% of eligible costs for nine months from 6 October 2026, so now is a good time to look at it. See our full guide to SEAI solar grants for details.

France made it law. Ireland has no policy.

France has gone further than anyone. Under its 2023 renewable energy acceleration law (the “APER” law), operators of large outdoor car parks of more than 1,500 m² must cover at least half the area with solar canopies, with deadlines phased in to 2028. Shade trees and green planting can count towards part of it. The detail of the French rules is here.

Ireland has no equivalent policy, even as demand on the grid climbs. According to the Central Statistics Office, data centres alone used 23% of Ireland’s metered electricity in 2025, up from just 5% in 2015. Every kilowatt-hour made on a car park roof in Waterford is one that doesn’t have to be generated somewhere else and carried across the country.

“In Basel, this is completely normal”

I lived in Basel in Switzerland for a while, and solar carports are an everyday sight there. You park under them at supermarkets and offices and nobody thinks twice about it. Here in Waterford we have huge car parks that do nothing except hold cars. Putting solar over them keeps our fields free for farming and housing, and makes power right where it’s used. I’d love to see Waterford lead the way on this.

What would it take?

Solar carports cost more per panel than a roof-mounted system because of the steel structure and foundations, and free-standing canopies will generally need planning permission, so check with the local authority early. But they open up space that would otherwise never generate anything, and with the current business grant rate, the payback looks better than it has in years. The key steps are:

1. A site survey to check layout, shading and grid connection.
2. A design that matches generation to the building’s daytime use.
3. Planning, and an SEAI grant application approved before any work starts.
4. Installation by an SEAI-registered company.

Own a car park in Waterford?

If you manage a supermarket, retail park, hotel, hospital, school or business park car park in Waterford or the South East, Irish Wind & Solar can tell you what it could generate and what it would cost. Commercial customers can book a free energy audit, or see our commercial solar solutions and Waterford solar pages.

Contact us today for a free car park solar assessment.

Figures are estimates for a typical South East site and will vary with layout, orientation and shading. Photo: “Parking under Solar Canopy” via Wikimedia Commons, CC BY 2.0.

Related: how the structures work: solar carports, including cantilever designs.

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