Northern Ireland's Renewable Electricity Record: Where Home Solar and Batteries Fit

On 3 September 2026 the Department for the Economy published figures showing that 53% of the electricity generated in Northern Ireland in the 12 months to June 2026 came from renewable sources. The Economy Minister called it a record. Eleven days later, on 14 September, the Utility Regulator published Northern Ireland’s first Flexibility Needs Assessment, a 119-page look at how the grid copes with all that wind.

I run a solar quote site, so my question is how much of this has to do with panels on a roof. Not much yet. The reasons are worth knowing before anyone sells you a battery on the back of the headlines. I checked every figure below against the original publications on 1 October 2026.

What the record actually says

The figures come from the Electricity Consumption and Renewable Generation in Northern Ireland report for July 2025 to June 2026, published by the Department for the Economy.

• Northern Ireland generated 8,286 GWh of electricity. 4,431 GWh (53%) was renewable and 3,855 GWh (47%) was not.
• Of the renewable share, 74% came from wind, 18% from bioenergy, 6% from solar, 1% from landfill gas and 1% from hydro and tidal.
• Measured against total demand, which counts imports and exports, renewables were equivalent to 50%. That matches the previous high set in late 2022 and early 2023, and is up from 44% a year earlier.
• On a rolling 12-month basis, renewable generation has been higher than fossil generation every month since January 2026, for the first time since the series began in 2018.

One detail the headline skips: the same series put the share at 54% for the 12 months to May 2026, so June is a hair below the month before. The trend is still up, and the Minister’s announcement calls it a record.

Solar’s 6% is 257 GWh over the year, and that includes estimates for rooftop and other small-scale systems. Wind made 3,287 GWh. That is the scale of it: wind made about 13 times as much as every solar panel in Northern Ireland put together.

When the sun helps and when the wind carries it

This is the part I can add from our own data. The department publishes monthly generation by technology, and since January this site has modelled what a 4kW south-facing roof in seven NI towns would have produced each day on the Solar Today tracker. Here are the months where both exist, with Belfast as the tracker town.

Month	NI wind (GWh)	NI solar (GWh)	Modelled 4kW roof in Belfast (kWh)
February 2026	345	16	86
March 2026	346	23	213
April 2026	278	26	348
May 2026	222	30	415
June 2026	210	28	369

Grid figures from the department’s monthly series (Figure 6 of the report). Tracker figures from our monthly CSV, modelled from measured Open-Meteo radiation at a performance ratio of 0.78, not metered from a real roof. Both checked on 1 October 2026.

The two lines run in opposite directions. Wind was strongest in February and March and weakest in June. Solar went the other way. On a Belfast roof, May produced nearly five times what February did.

The official solar series rises less steeply than my model, from 16 GWh in February to 30 in May. I can’t fully explain that gap from the published method. One model roof facing due south will never match every solar farm and rooftop in NI, but the direction is the same.

Rooftop solar is a spring and summer contributor. In December 2025, wind generated 341 GWh and solar 13. Through the darker months wind carries the renewable share, and a 4kW Belfast roof makes about 3 kWh on an average February day. That still knocks units off your bill. It is not holding the grid up.

What the flexibility report says, in plain terms

Flexibility means anything that can move when electricity is made or used: storage, demand that can shift, interconnectors to Great Britain and Ireland. The full report was put together with SONI and NIE Networks, and four findings matter for a household.

Renewable power is already being wasted. Citing SONI, the report says about 19% of available renewable electricity in Northern Ireland was curtailed in 2025, including 22% of available wind.

The main cause is the network, not a lack of batteries. The report names transmission constraints as the dominant driver of curtailment, with flexibility playing a complementary role. In SONI’s modelling for 2030 and 2033, curtailment is worst in winter, spring and autumn and tracks wind far more closely than solar. On days when curtailment does happen, though, it is more likely to fall during hours of solar generation.

Households are almost entirely outside the price signals. About 96.6% of household customers are not on time-of-use or real-time prices, and the report lists limited smart metering and data access among the barriers. Smart meters are scheduled to start going in early in 2028, over three years.

Nothing is decided for homes yet. The report is technology-neutral and sets no household scheme. It will be repeated every two years, and the next one is due by July 2028.

What that means for a home with a battery today

A battery in an NI home does one thing that pays. It stores solar you would otherwise export for 11.88p per kWh (Power NI’s rate from 1 October 2026) so you use it in the evening instead of buying power at 32p to 34p. That is the whole case, and our home battery guide works it through month by month.

Great Britain’s Demand Flexibility Service and Smart Export Guarantee are GB schemes and do not cover Northern Ireland. NI export rates are set voluntarily by each supplier, as our export payments guide explains. The flexibility report says households can in principle take part through suppliers or aggregators. I am not aware of any supplier offering that to NI homes today, so I would not pay extra for a battery on the promise of future grid payments.

What the report does point to is the 2028 smart meter rollout and the time-of-use tariffs expected alongside it. If those arrive, a battery that charges cheaply when wind is plentiful becomes more useful in exactly the months solar alone will not fill it. That is a reason to ask an installer how a battery would work with a time-of-use tariff later. It is not a number to put in a payback sum now.

If you want to see what panels, and a battery priced on its own line, would cost on your roof, you can compare quotes from NI installers. The month-by-month generation behind the table above is on the 2026 generation page.