I talked in 2022 about how I expected Wind farms in Ireland to have solar added to them. The short version is a bad piece of land with a big electricity cable leaving it that is already selling electricity seems idea to put solar on.
Because solar is during summer days and the wind mostly winter nights the chances of maximum wind and solar being at any one time is small. And when those windy and sunny times do happen the whole grid will have so much electricity that extra watts will not be valuable. Some wind farms are forested but many are pretty bare hillsides.
Solar panels keep getting cheaper. At the moment they are €0.06/W. To take one example Raheenleagh Wind Farm has a capacity 35.2MW which would cost now just over €2 million in panels.
Panels are about half the costs of solar farms (planning permission permits etc make up a lot of the rest. Stands a 10%ish chunk. With the inverter and other electrical stuff a fairly small percentage 15%ish).
Combined solar and wind farms make sense in Ireland. It means some infrastructure can be reused and a lot of the work that has already been done for an area. For example this planned hybrid site has 'Grid connection via the existing Richfield Wind Farm 38kV substation;'
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