Clean Export Guarantee: What You Actually Get Paid for Exported Solar

Key Takeaways

• There is no national feed-in tariff in Ireland. The Clean Export Guarantee obliges every licensed supplier to pay for exported units, but each supplier sets its own rate.
• Rates are being cut, not raised. Pinergy publishes 25c per kWh ex VAT moving to 18.5c per kWh ex VAT from 1 August 2026 — roughly a 26% reduction.
• The export rate matters more than the grant over the life of a system: the SEAI grant is capped at €1,800 and paid once, while the export rate applies to every surplus unit for years.
• Without a smart meter your export is deemed — estimated rather than measured — which is an assumption about your household, not a reading from it.

Is there one Irish feed-in tariff?

No, and this is the most consequential misunderstanding in Irish solar sales. The Clean Export Guarantee is an obligation on suppliers to pay you for surplus electricity you export. It is not a rate set by the regulator, and it is not the same everywhere.

That means the export figure in a quote is only true for the supplier it was calculated against. Switch supplier and the payback model in that spreadsheet changes, without a single panel moving.

What are the actual rates?

We publish figures we can read off a supplier's own page, with the date we read them. Rates quoted second-hand by comparison sites and installers go stale quickly, and in 2026 they are going stale in one direction.

Read from Pinergy's own Clean Export Guarantee page, 9 August 2026. Rates exclude VAT.

We have not verified other suppliers' current rates from their own published pages. Energia's site refused automated access when we checked, and we do not route around a site's bot protection to take a number — so rather than repeat a figure from a comparison site, this table stays short until we can read each rate at source. Check your own supplier's published microgeneration or Clean Export Guarantee page before running any payback sum.

What a 25c-to-18.5c cut actually does

The arithmetic is unforgiving because it applies to every exported unit, every year.

Take a household exporting 1,500 kWh a year — a plausible figure for a modest array on a house that is empty during the day, though your own export depends entirely on your roof and your habits:

• At 25c: €375 a year
• At 18.5c: €277.50 a year
• Difference: €97.50 a year

Against an SEAI grant capped at €1,800, that gap closes the distance in under twenty years — and it does not stop there, because the grant is paid once and the rate cut recurs. This is why a payback figure computed at the old rate quietly stops being true.

Note what the example is and is not: the 25c and 18.5c figures are Pinergy's published rates, and the 1,500 kWh is an illustration of the arithmetic rather than a claim about your house. Substitute your own export figure — the shape of the result does not change.

Why self-consumption beats export

When the export rate falls, the unit you do not import becomes worth more than the unit you export, because you avoid paying the retail rate rather than earning the export rate. The bigger the gap between the two, the more it pays to move consumption into daylight hours — running the dishwasher, the washing machine, the immersion or an EV charger while the panels are producing.

This is the same conclusion Pakistani and Californian households reached when their own export regimes were cut, and the mechanism is identical: an export rate below the import rate turns a solar array from a generator you sell from into a bill you avoid.

It also changes the sizing question. Under a generous export rate, a larger array is close to self-funding. Under a reduced one, capacity you cannot use yourself earns the lower number, which argues for sizing to your daytime demand rather than to your roof.

What to check before you sign

• Your supplier's current published rate — on their page, not in the quote.
• Whether that rate is changing, and when. A rate valid in July may not be valid in August.
• Whether the rate excludes VAT, as Pinergy's does. An ex-VAT figure is not what lands in your account.
• Whether you have a smart meter, or whether your export will be deemed.
• How much you can shift into daylight, because that is the number under your control.

The grant is the number everyone quotes. The export rate is the number that decides whether the system pays, and unlike the grant, it can be changed after you have bought the panels.