Calvin Lan, CEO of Huawei Ireland, discusses the work to be done on Ireland’s commitment to 8GW of solar capacity by 2030.
In November 2025, Ireland’s national solar capacity will cross 2GW capacity for the first time. It was a milestone that would have seemed ambitious just a few years ago, and one that Huawei Ireland, which provides inverter systems and grid management technology for many of those installations, has put on display.
For Calvin Lan, CEO of Huawei Ireland, that milestone was a starting point, not a destination. Ireland, as a country, has committed to 8GW of ambitious solar capacity by 2030, so there is still a lot of work to be done.
Lan says: “The gap between where we are and where we need to be is significant. The technology to bridge the gap is there. The question is whether Irish organizations will move fast enough to use it,” he said.
It’s an economic issue
Green energy is not, primarily, a sustainability discussion, but an economic one, Lan said. Energy costs in Ireland are among the highest in Europe, and solar and storage companies will now be in a more competitive position for those waiting, he says.
Research published by Huawei Ireland last year found that more than 60pc of Irish businesses expect green technology to improve their efficiency. Lan finds the nature of those conversations more telling than the headline figure.
“Customers are now asking specific, operational questions about solar deployment or storage, return on investment, integration with existing infrastructure. That’s a noticeable change from where we were two or three years ago.”
The change is evident in Huawei Ireland’s business. Demand for solar and energy storage technologies has grown steadily as a share of total revenue over the past two to three years, Lan said, adding that this is a market-wide phenomenon.
Solar energy, he notes, is already part of everyday life for many in Ireland, powering homes, farms and businesses across the country, and cutting both debt and emissions in the process.
However, there are still doubts in some sectors, he notes. “Companies want to understand what their competitors are doing before committing. That’s natural, but in a market that moves this quickly there are real costs.”
Organizations that move too fast, he says, are not doing so for reasons of sustainability. “They do it because it makes financial sense. Energy costs are a competitive issue.”
Handling watts in bits
Huawei does not make solar panels. Its position in the energy market is built on inverter systems, storage technology and self-regulating data infrastructure.
“We are an ICT company first and foremost,” explains Lan. “We are electrical engineers with over 30 years of expertise and billions invested in research and development, and applied directly to the power challenge. The way we think is to manage watts with bits.”
That convergence of digital infrastructure and energy, in his view, is where the most important innovation in the industry is happening. “You can’t manage a complex energy system without the data infrastructure to run it. Digital powers everything else.”
And that’s where Huawei’s particular advantage lies, he says — a company that spent three decades building infrastructure to manage complex data flows is now applying that technology to managing complex power flows.
The grid challenge
One of the less obvious challenges to Ireland’s energy transition is what happens to grid stability as renewable generation grows. Traditional power systems rely on large synchronous generators for inertia, physical resistance and sudden frequency changes that keep the network stable. As fossil fuel plants are retired, that inertia decreases, and the grid becomes more difficult to manage.
Conventional renewable inverters are ‘grid-following’. They read the signal from the network and adapt to it, but they cannot stabilize the system independently. ‘Grid forming’ inverters work differently. They can generate and control a stable voltage and frequency on their own, effectively working as what engineers describe as a virtual synchronizing machine.
“That means they can support grid resiliency even when very few traditional generators are online,” said Lan, “which is very important as Ireland’s renewable share grows and the grid becomes more complex to manage. It’s one of the most exciting developments in the industry at the moment, and I think it’s going to really surprise people who haven’t experienced it before.”
Huawei’s SUN2000-330KTL, which won Best Renewable Energy Product at the SEAI Energy Show in April, combines these capabilities, Lan said. The company also introduced the SUN2000-506KTL, a new utility scale system that is part of the FusionSolar 9.0 platform, which combines high power density with advanced grid-forming capabilities and is designed to deliver high yields at low system costs.
The time is now
Lan says now is the time for Irish organizations to make important decisions for change and that there is a real cost to delaying them.
“Change is happening, not eventually, but now,” he says. “I think there’s still a tendency to treat green energy as a long-term priority rather than an immediate one.” Organizations that move fast don’t do it for reasons of sustainability alone. They do it because it makes financial sense.”
When it comes to accelerating adoption, Lan says real-life case studies are more important than arguments. He sees solar deployment at scale in Ireland, in a comparable business, shortening the decision cycle faster than any amount of policy discussion, he argues.
“The technology is there. The case studies are real. What accelerates discovery is confidence, and confidence comes from seeing it done.”
He also points to the dimension of skills, which often receives less attention in the energy debate than investment or policy. The engineering and data skills needed to design, deploy and manage green energy infrastructure are in short supply around the world, he says.
“For students thinking about where to build a career, green technology is one of the most important fields you can choose to work in,” he said. “The skills needed are in short supply around the world, which means the demand for them will only grow.”
Huawei has been in Ireland for almost 20 years. Lan was speaking to SiliconRepublic.com ahead of the company’s annual Innovation Day – this year themed ‘Powering a Greener Future’ – at UCD O’Reilly Hall on 3 June. The event aims to bring together developers, engineers, policy makers and businesses to see what is already working at scale, in Ireland and on the world stage.
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