In November 2023, as chief executive and founder of Activ8 Solar Energies, Ciaran Marron was named best established entrepreneur at the annual EY Entrepreneur of the Year awards.
He was labelled a “pioneer” of the solar energy industry in Ireland, just as SSE Airtricity joined the company as a partner.
However, no matter how great a day that was, it couldn’t quite beat the moment two months later when the Monaghan senior football team walked out on to the pitch at Croke Park wearing jerseys emblazoned with the Activ8 logo.
“It was hugely special,” Marron says with a bigsmile. “It couldn’t get any more special than under the lights in Croke Park. It was first round of the league against the Dubs. To beat them and get front page of many newspapers. It couldn’t have started any better.”
Unfortunately, “it was downhill after that,” he adds, sitting in the company’s carbon-neutral office space in Carrickmacross. “We didn’t do a whole lot of winning after that.”
[ Activ8 Solar Energies founder scoops Established Entrepreneur of the Year awardOpens in new window ]
Marron is a Monaghan man through and through. Via initiative and determination, he has grown a small start-up into Ireland’s largest provider of solar energy panels, with a growing presence in continental Europe too.
But when it came to starting his own business, did he consider relocating?
“It was never going to be anywhere else but Monaghan. There are a lot of entrepreneurs here. Statistics say that we’ve more entrepreneurs per capita than any other county in Ireland,” he says.
Marron points out the window of his office towards his old secondary school. “Look, you can see the goalposts right there.”
The black-painted tips of the posts on the Inver College GAA pitches can be seen poking up over the tree line at the edge of the property.
“The whole way through Inver College, I was strong in the technical subjects. Very weak at Irish, English and French. But maths, physics and metalwork? In those, I was as strong as anybody.”
It was while working at his father’s milk machine business that Marron realised his potential lay in engineering. “I loved every minute of it, so much so that I didn’t want to go on and finish my education,” he recalls.
As happens in many families, father and son reached a deal, Marron agreeing to try a year of studying electronic engineering at Dundalk Institute of Technology, “to see if it would stick”, as he puts it.
It stuck. After college, it was far from plain sailing. Marron arrived into the workforce as a “freshly qualified engineer” just as the industry and wider economy were going through a period of lay-offs and redundancies.
“I was at a crossroads; it was time for a reset,” he says.
He began his professional career as an apprentice in Ardee, Co Louth, working on heat pumps. Upon completing his apprenticeship he was working “massive hours” and decided “if I can do this for someone else, I could do this for myself”.
It was at this time, in late 2005, that a thought came to the budding entrepreneur.
“I had the idea that solar was going to be good solution. Why was nobody in Ireland really looking at the true potential of solar hot water systems?”
In January 2006, his company began trading under his own name and started to build relationships in the solar panel space.
The company’s first break was with a UK-based company. Ciaran Marron Electrical Mechanical, as it was known before becoming Activ8 Solar Energies, was buying from an Irish agent for a UK company, which itself was buying from a German company that was sourcing solar panels from GREENoneTEC in Austria.
We saw a lot of potential in the business. Did I see the potential we wrote down on paper at the time? Potentially no – but we certainly put our best food forward
— Ciaran Marron
“As you can imagine, there were a lot of slices being taken along the way,” he says with a chuckle.
As one of the first adopters of solar panels in Ireland, people told Marron that he was “brave”.
“But it wasn’t brave back then, anyone could have got set up ... but then the bubble bust, things started to tighten.”
As the recession began to hit, money the company was owed was not coming through. Faced with a decision, Marron decided to double down on the retrofitting market based on the “huge interest” people had in reducing expenditure by generating their own hot water from solar panels.
“But my problem was, I needed to go the whole way back up the chain to get to the product in Austria,” he says.
The fledgling team, fewer than 10 people at the time, put together a business plan and met the manufacturer, saying: “We are going to be the biggest and best in Ireland. We are going to take over.”
No shortage of ambition, then.
“There might have been a few white lies in the mix,” he admits. “They were looking at us – where were we on the map? We saw a lot of potential in the business. Did I see the potential we wrote down on paper at the time? Potentially no – but we certainly put our best food forward.”
A “stroke of luck” played its part in securing the contract with GREENoneTEC for the Austrian company to custom design solar panels for Activ8‘s Irish customers.
Representatives of their potential suppliers were due to fly to Ireland to view Activ8’s nascent headquarters. In preparation for the meeting, Marron says he “had [architect] plans [belonging to] a friend who was building a big warehouse and I stuck my logo on the corner of it to pretend that was our warehouse”.
“Anyone who had a black vehicle – black vehicles was our thing at the time – I placed an Activ8 sticker on the side to say ‘this is our fleet’.”
Only half of said fleet, he admits, really was the company’s.
“I was all set up ready for them to arrive. But they couldn’t arrive.”
Dublin Airport’s radar had gone down, causing flight disruption; Activ8‘s prospective suppliers were stuck in London, where they had flown for a connecting flight, so the quick-thinking Marron jumped on a plane to meet them, warehouse plans in hand.
“I went to Belfast, flew to London and signed the contract. Three years later they realised what I said I could do in terms of sales volume I had done, and more, but the new warehouse was never built, the fleet I said I owned, I didn’t really own.”
Within very short period of time we became one of the largest installers in the North. We were already the largest in the South
— Ciaran Marron
How did GREENoneTEC feel about that when they found out? “They found it hilarious,” he says, “but we had become one of their biggest customers in Europe – so they were more than delighted.”
With the supply relationships built, and a booming market in retrofitting homes even during the recession, Activ8 began to scale up the size of the business, installing 25 systems per week in the residential market.
Three years later, it expanded into Northern Ireland, setting up a base in Lisburn to start installing solar photovoltaic (PV) panels. Business was booming. Soon the company outgrew that base and moved to Newry.
“Within very short period of time we became one of the largest installers in the North. We were already the largest in the South,” says Marron.
By then, Activ8 had expanded into the commercial market. When the tender for the SSE Arena [in Belfast] rooftop solar panel project came up, the company went for it. However, it was one of the smallest players, with bids coming in from energy companies across the UK. So the company decided to be bold.
[ SSE buys rights to develop battery energy storage project in OffalyOpens in new window ]
“We put our money where our mouth is, and said: ‘Look, you give us the contract by this time, but if we don’t deliver it; you don’t pay us.’”
The ploy worked but explaining the conditional nature of the deal to the team back at Activ8‘s Monaghan headquarters was a different prospect. Working to complete the installation project before Northern Ireland solar grants expired in 2017, the team finished it in just two weeks.
That was a landmark moment for the company. Marron still has a large picture of the rooftop project hanging on the wall in his office, signifying the moment the company made it big and people across the industry began to notice Activ8, including SSE.
Exactly one year after the arena project was commissioned, SSE acquired 40 per cent of Activ8, increasing that to 50 per cent a year later.
“It’s the big plc alongside the small man from Corduff,” says Marron.
From a cultural perspective, the arrival of the renewable energy multinational didn’t change much, Marron says. “There might have been fear among our staff at the time over how much would change, but it was fairly evident very quickly that nothing really changed. The logo over the front door changed, and that was about it.”
Marron says SSE “invested in a company they believed in” and empowered its management to “continue doing what we do”, noting that its “ambitions grew” with SSE’s backing.
“That was around the time the government introduced the grant for solar PV panels in Ireland.”
Activ8 was one of seven companies first approved to install these electricity-generating units, a number that has grown to more than 500, he says.
“We are still the largest at what we do; we have grown with the industry,” says Marron.
Activ8 now has more than 270 staff, with revenue in excess of €42.5 million in 2023. It moved into a purpose-built office at the Nexus Business Park in Carrickmacross, which is also owned by Marron.
Since then, the company has had to expand numerous times to accommodate its growth, especially after it acquired 50 per cent of Allbrite, a leading heat pump company, in late 2023.
Marron says revenue in 2024 was “touching €50 million” and is projecting a figure closer to €70 million this year. He assures me these figures are more accurate than the projections he gave to suppliers at the foundation of the business.
“We’re ambitious in what we do aim for, but we are calculated.”
Marron sees the future growth for the company being driven by the commercial sector, citing a 150 per cent growth in the number of units, as measured in terms of megawatts, his company has installed.
“We installed over 20MW last year; that will be closer to 50MW this year. That is where we see a lot of growth – residential is steady, it is a good business,” he says, “but commercial is where we see the most growth.”
Activ8 has just completed its first project in the Netherlands and has opened an office in Liverpool.
It is set to announce the construction of a large, 4.5MW, 25-acre solar farm, with further commercial projects currently under way, such as a 3MW farm at John Lennon Airport in Liverpool, which is projected to meet 25 per cent of the airport’s power needs.
Marron sees further “rapid growth” in the UK and across Europe in the data centre world.
To fuel that growth, Activ8 has developed its own, custom-built solar panels for which “everything is designed in-house”. This allows the company to be in full control of the quality of the product, says Marron. Bringing the design in-house allowed the firm to build the ATLAS Duo N-Type, its custom solar PV panel, specifically for the Irish market.
Most of Activ8’s competitors, Marron says, are using general engineering companies abroad to design their products. It’s not the industry norm yet but, as he says throughout the interview, Activ8 doesn’t just “meet the standards – we set the standards”.
CV
Name: Ciaran Marron
Age: 43
Job: Chief executive of Activ8 Solar Energies
Lives: Carrickmacross, Co Monaghan
Family: Married to Orla with four children, two boys and two girls
Hobbies: Coaching GAA and watching Formula 1 (he’s a Jenson Button fan)
Something you might expect: Having started as an engineer, he still goes to trade shows with the same excitement he had fresh out of college.
Something that might surprise: He competes in rally driving, more recently as a navigator. “It’s a drug, it’s a bug. The most recent car I drove was a Mitsubishi Evo 8.”
