Calvin Lan, CEO of Huawei Ireland, discusses the work to be done on Ireland’s commitment to an ambitious 8GW of solar capacity by 2030.
In November 2025, Ireland’s national solar capacity crossed 2GW of capacity for the first time. It was a milestone that would have seemed ambitious just a few years earlier, and one that Huawei Ireland, which supplies inverter systems and grid management technology to many of the those installations, has watched closely.
For Calvin Lan, CEO of Huawei Ireland, that milestone was very much a starting point, not a destination. Ireland, as a country, has committed to an ambitious 8GW of solar capacity by 2030, so there’s much work left to do.
“The gap between where we are and where we need to be is significant,” says Lan. The technology to close the divide exists. The question is whether Irish organisations will move quickly enough to use it, he says.
An economic issue
Green energy is not, primarily, a sustainability conversation, but an economic one, says Lan. Ireland’s energy costs are among the highest in Europe, and the companies moving on solar and storage now will be in a far more competitive position to those that wait, he says.
Research published by Huawei Ireland last year found that more than 60pc of Irish businesses expect green technology to improve their operational efficiency. Lan finds the nature of those conversations more telling than the headline figure.
“Customers are now asking specific, operational questions about solar or storage deployments, return on investment, integration with existing infrastructure. That is a meaningful change from where we were even two or three years ago.”
The shift is visible in Huawei Ireland’s own business. Demand for solar and energy storage technologies has grown steadily as a share of overall revenue over the past two to three years, says Lan, who adds that this is a market-wide phenomenon.
Solar energy, he notes, is already part of daily life for many in Ireland, powering homes, farms and businesses across the country, and cutting both bills and emissions in the process.
However, there is still reluctance in some sectors, he notes. “Companies want to understand what their competitors are doing before committing. That is a natural instinct, but in a market moving this quickly it carries a real cost.”
The organisations that are moving fastest, he says, are not doing so purely for sustainability reasons. “They are doing it because it makes financial sense. Energy costs are a competitive issue.”
Managing watts with bits
Huawei does not manufacture solar panels. Its position in the energy market is built on inverter systems, storage technology and the data infrastructure that manages them.
“We are first and foremost an ICT company,” Lan explains. “We are electrical engineers who have taken over 30 years of expertise and billions invested in research and development, and applied them directly to the energy challenge. The way we think about it is managing watts with bits.”
That convergence of digital and energy infrastructure is, in his view, where the most consequential innovation in the sector is currently happening. “You simply cannot manage a complex energy system without the data infrastructure to run it. Digital is the enabler of everything else.”
It is also where Huawei’s specific advantage lies, he says – a company that has spent three decades building the architecture for managing complex data flows is now applying that expertise to managing complex energy flows.
The grid challenge
One of the less visible challenges in Ireland’s energy transition is what happens to grid stability as renewable generation grows. Traditional power systems depend on large synchronous generators for inertia, a physical resistance to sudden frequency changes that keeps the network stable. As fossil fuel plants are retired, that inertia decreases, and the grid becomes harder to manage.
Conventional renewable inverters are ‘grid-following’. They read the signal from the network and synchronise to it, but cannot stabilise the system independently. ‘Grid-forming’ inverters work differently. They can generate and regulate stable voltage and frequency on their own, effectively functioning as what engineers describe as a virtual synchronous machine.
“That means they can support grid stability even when very few traditional generators are online,” Lan says, “which is increasingly relevant as Ireland’s renewable share grows and the grid becomes more complex to manage. It is one of the more exciting developments in the sector right now, and I think it will genuinely surprise people who have not encountered it before.”
Huawei’s SUN2000-330KTL, which won Best Renewable Energy Product at the SEAI Energy Show in April, incorporates these capabilities, Lan says. The company is also launching the SUN2000-506KTL, a new utility-scale system forming part of the FusionSolar 9.0 platform, which combines high power density with advanced grid-forming capability and is designed to deliver higher yields at lower system cost.
The time is now
Lan argues that now is the time for Irish organisations to make the key transition decisions and that there are real costs to deferring them.
“The transition is achievable, not eventually, but now,” he says. “I think there is still a tendency to treat green energy as a long-term strategic priority rather than an immediate operational one. The organisations that are moving fastest are not doing it purely for sustainability reasons. They are doing it because it makes financial sense.”
When it comes to accelerating adoption, Lan says real-life case studies matter more than arguments. Seeing a solar deployment working at scale in Ireland, in a comparable business, shortens the decision cycle faster than any amount of policy discussion, he argues.
“The technology exists. The case studies are real. What accelerates adoption is confidence, and confidence comes from seeing it done.”
He points too to the skills dimension, one that tends to get less attention in the energy debate than investment or policy. The engineering and data capabilities required to design, deploy and manage green energy infrastructure are in short supply globally, he says.
“For students considering where to build a career, green tech is one of the most important fields you could choose to work in,” he says. “The skills required are in short supply globally, which means demand for them will only grow.”
Huawei has been in Ireland for nearly 20 years. Lan was speaking to SiliconRepublic.com ahead of the company’s annual Innovation Day – themed ‘Powering a Greener Future’ this year – at UCD O’Reilly Hall on 3 June. The event aims to to bring together developers, engineers, policymakers and businesses to see what is already working at scale, in Ireland and on the global stage.
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