Solar industry criticizes government for "serious strategic mistakes"

The Government has offered its support for solar power projects above 5MW of capacity to be scrapped. Whilst the announcement has received criticism, the Department for Energy and Climate Change intends to go ahead irrespective of the majority of respondents having opposed the proposals to stop bigger solar farms benefitting from the Renewable Obligation.

The Department announced:

“Our assessment remains that large-scale solar PV is deploying more rapidly than we previously estimated and poses a significant risk of breaching the Levy Control Framework within the next two years”.

As a result the Solar Trade Association has spoken out against the Government’s decision. They warn it represents a “serious strategic mistakes in energy policy”.

Chief Executive Paul Barwell said: “Pulling the rug on the technology the International Energy Agency says could be the biggest global power source by 2050 is crazy! This is unfair and unjustified discrimination against large scale solar. A fair outcome would be an RO banding review based on up-to-date costs, which we have provided to DECC. Our message to Ministers is simple: Let us compete on a level footing with the other technologies that still get RO support.” The DECC is now discussing a balancing period to protect the large scale solar projects that have already made financial commitments before the change. The Department said:

“Industry argued that the single biggest uncertainty for projects in the run up to the RO closure deadline would be grid connection delays. We are proposing a three-month grid delay grace period because it is specifically targeted at large-scale solar PV, which generally has much faster deployment times than most other technologies.”