Northern Ireland Solar Installations: Latest DESNZ Figures

Last updated: 7 May 2026, using the DESNZ Solar PV Deployment release for March 2026 (published 30 April 2026). We refresh this page after every monthly DESNZ release.

The UK has just crossed two million solar installations. Provisional figures published by the Department for Energy Security and Net Zero on 30 April show that as of the end of March 2026, the UK has 22.1 GW of solar capacity spread across 2,003,173 installations.

March alone delivered 27,607 new installations and 121 MW of new capacity. That makes it the busiest single month for UK solar since 2012, when the original Feed-in Tariff rush was at its peak.

For Northern Ireland the picture is quieter, but the trend is the same direction. NI sits at 35,138 installations and 406.9 MW of capacity at the end of March 2026, having added 328 new systems and 1.8 MW in that month. The numbers are smaller, the growth rate is slower, and the explanation for both is in the policy history. Worth pulling apart properly.

Northern Ireland’s place in the UK figure

NI accounts for 1.75% of UK solar installations and 1.84% of UK solar capacity. With NI households making up about 2.8% of the UK total, solar penetration here is roughly two thirds of what it would be if NI tracked the UK average.

Measure	UK	Northern Ireland	NI share
Cumulative installations (Mar 2026)	2,003,173	35,138	1.75%
Cumulative capacity (Mar 2026)	22,136 MW	406.9 MW	1.84%
Installations added Mar 2026	27,607	328	1.19%
Capacity added Mar 2026	121 MW	1.81 MW	1.50%
12-month growth (Mar 2025 to Mar 2026)	+16.0%	+9.9%	–

Source: DESNZ, Solar Photovoltaics Deployment, March 2026 release (published 30 April 2026).

The takeaway is plain. NI is on the same trajectory as the rest of the UK, just lagging it by roughly a year. If NI’s rate matched the UK average over the next twelve months, it would add closer to 5,500 installations rather than the 3,000 to 4,000 implied by the current run rate.

NI by system size

Drilling into the capacity bands shows what kind of solar Northern Ireland actually has on the ground.

System size	NI installations	NI capacity (MW)	What it usually means
Under 4 kW	12,260	33.4	Smaller terraces, partial roofs, older installs from before panels got cheap
4 to 10 kW	19,632	99.0	The typical NI domestic sweet spot, semi-detached and detached houses
10 to 50 kW	3,074	52.6	Large family homes, small businesses, schools
50 kW to 5 MW	156	31.0	Commercial roofs, depots, agri-buildings
5 to 25 MW	14	118.0	Mid-size solar farms
25 MW or more	2	72.9	NI’s two largest grid-connected solar plants
Total	35,138	406.9	–

Two-thirds of NI installations land in the 0 to 10 kW domestic band. That is good news if you are weighing up solar for a typical NI home: the supply chain, the engineering and the connection process for a 4 to 6 kW panel array is well-trodden ground here. Where NI thins out is the middle. Mid-size commercial solar (50 kW to 5 MW) is still rare: just 156 installations across the whole region. There is real headroom for warehouse roofs, dairy parlours and factory sheds.

Where the official UK data comes from

Anyone reading a “the UK has X solar” headline should know how that number is built. DESNZ does not run a single solar census. The monthly figure is stitched together from eight separate registers:

• The Renewable Energy Planning Database (REPD) for projects above 150 kW
• The Microgeneration Certification Scheme (MCS) database for accredited domestic and small commercial installs
• The Major Power Producers (MPP) survey for utility-scale generators
• The Renewables Obligation (RO) register
• The Feed-in Tariff Central Register (closed to new entrants since 2019, but still tracking legacy systems)
• Contracts for Difference (CfD) data
• Distribution Network Operator embedded capacity registers
• Ofgem’s REGO dataset for renewable certificates

The strengths of this approach: every accredited install is captured, the figures cross-check, and historical revisions happen openly (DESNZ flagged a recent NI revision where four sites previously reported as one have now been split out).

The known weakness, called out in the release itself: “unsubsidised installations under 150 kW that are not certified through MCS may not be captured.” That gap matters more in 2026 than it did five years ago. A growing share of small commercial and domestic batteries-plus-solar bypass MCS where the customer is not chasing an export tariff, so the true installed base may be slightly higher than the official figure suggests, particularly in NI where MCS uptake has historically been thinner than GB.

Why NI lags

The 2010 to 2019 GB solar boom ran on the Feed-in Tariff: a guaranteed export payment that turned a domestic install into a clear financial product. NI households never had access to it. The smaller Northern Ireland Renewables Obligation (NIRO) ran until 31 March 2017 and then closed for new entrants, leaving NI with a roughly five-year window of essentially no domestic incentive.

What has changed since 2023 is that electricity prices, particularly in NI where rates run above the GB average, have started doing the work the FiT used to do. The payback maths now stacks up on bill savings alone for many homes. The NIE Networks G98 connection process has matured, installer count has roughly doubled in the past three years (anecdotally, not yet in the official statistics), and the Warm Homes Plan is bringing back capital support for the lowest-income homes after a long gap.

The result is the steady run rate visible in the data: NI is adding around 280 to 330 new installations a month and accelerating gently. If electricity prices stay where they are, that curve should steepen.

What it means if you are thinking about solar

Three practical takeaways from this month’s data:

1. You are not early any more. With 35,000 NI homes and small businesses already on solar, there is no shortage of nearby reference systems and installers who have done the work hundreds of times before. Ask any quoting installer for two recent local references. They will have them.
2. A 4 to 6 kW system is the well-worn path in NI. That is where 19,632 of NI’s 35,138 installations sit. Hardware availability is best in this band, prices are most competitive, and grid connection (G98) is the simplest.
3. The commercial gap is real. If you run a small warehouse, dairy, depot, agri-building or office in NI, the data shows mid-size commercial solar is still under-deployed. That usually means installers compete harder for the work and finance options are more flexible. Worth getting two or three quotes if your roof has the area.

What we are tracking next

DESNZ updates the deployment dataset on the last Thursday of every month. The next release covering April 2026 lands on Thursday 28 May 2026. We refresh this page after each release so the headline figures, growth rates and capacity-band table stay current.

If you want to look at the source data yourself, the spreadsheet is free to download from gov.uk/government/statistics/solar-photovoltaics-deployment. The relevant tables for an NI reader are Table 1 (capacity bands) and Table 2 (UK nations split, including NI).