About this site, and what it does not do
What it is
A tracker for renewable energy projects in the Irish planning system, joined to the grid capacity that determines whether they can connect. Everything here is assembled from public records, on a schedule, and republished with the date it was retrieved.
Sources
| Source | What it provides | Cadence |
|---|---|---|
National planning register (ArcGIS IrishPlanningApplications) |
Applications, status, decisions, appeals, dates, site area, location | Continuous |
An Coimisiun Pleanala case register (ArcGIS Cases_2016_Onwards) |
Applications made directly to the Commission — Strategic Infrastructure Development and marine schemes, which no council register carries — with the site boundary each case publishes | Continuous, 2016 onward |
| ESB Networks generation capacity headroom report | Named substations, voltage, coordinates | Annual |
| ESB Networks network capacity heatmap | Available firm and non-firm generation capacity per station | Quarterly |
| GeoNames postal codes (Ireland) | Where each of Ireland's Eircode routing keys is, so the lookup can place a reader from the first three characters of their Eircode. Used under CC-BY 4.0. | Periodic |
Register item 8f69dffe26324ba3acc653cf6cb5cf8b;
case register item 1163a53d3c6b485ea63c3441489b7808.
Service URLs are resolved from each publisher at run time rather than hard-coded, because they
move.
What the join can and cannot tell you
Nothing in the planning register shares an identifier with anything in the grid data. A project is linked to a substation only when the application names it, or when the project's own place name matches the station's and the two are close enough for that to be meaningful. A wrong link is worse than a missing one, so anything short of that is recorded as unmatched: currently 1146 of 2190 projects.
The distance to the nearest substation is a measurement. It is not a statement about where a project will connect — a project a kilometre from one station may be contracted to another.
What is not here
- Construction status, and generation for anything but wind. The planning register does not record when a project starts building or starts generating, so this site does not claim to know. Where SEAI records a wind farm already connected at a project's location, the page says so — 149 of 2190 pages carry that — and it is a fact about the place rather than about the application. No equivalent public list exists for solar or battery storage, so their pages are silent on it. That silence means the data does not exist, not that nothing was built.
- Capacity for most projects. Only 302 of 2190 applications state a figure in megawatts. The rest are shown by site area — as the register publishes it, or, for an application made directly to An Coimisiun Pleanala, as measured from the site boundary that case publishes. We do not estimate the others.
- Full Eircode geocoding. Eircode's address database is licensed, not open, so this site cannot — and does not want to — resolve a code to a building. Only the routing key is used, which places a reader near their town. The lookup covers all 139 routing keys, positioned from GeoNames under CC-BY 4.0.
- Lease rates. Not published here.
Corrections
If something here is wrong about your land or your application, tell us and we will check it against the source record.