Editor’s Blog

The ballot papers are out, canvassing has entered overdrive and yet still energy and the environment appear to be little more than afterthoughts for the four candidates for the Labour Party leadership. What does Labour’s failure to mount a challenge to the Tory’s green energy culls say about the party?

With potential boundary lines drawn around planning application submissions on 22 July 2015 and buildout under ROs by 31 March 2016, what DECC is effectively proposing is a cap on large-scale solar farm deployment under ROCs, with the final capacity installed based upon what the industry can manage to do now over the next seven and a half months.

The Department of Energy and Climate Change (DECC) has caused what could be potentially the most active day in ground-mounted solar applications seen yet in the industry, directly as a result of its proposals to change the Renewable Obligation (RO) goalposts for the solar industry.

The proposed cuts to solar subsidies has attracted the ire of the renewables industry since they were unveiled by the Department for Energy and Climate Change (DECC) late last month, but stinging criticism has poured in from unexpected sources too.

The immediate reaction following the Department of Energy and Climate Change’s 22 July 2015 proposal to change the goalposts for the UK solar industry was obviously one of despair, and what the impact on FY’17 forecasts for ground-mounted solar could be. However, that’s just one part of the story. The other relates to what is left, assuming most of the proposals will end up being rubber stamped by DECC.

In a normal world, if a market declined by an order of magnitude from one quarter to another, one would expect most of the industry participants to be looking for another career opportunity. But we are talking about the solar industry here, so normal benchmarks tend not to be in play too much.

If DECC’s proposals to draw a line under new RO applications from 22 July 2015 end up being written into policy, then potentially one of the hardest hit will be pure-play developers of solar farms.

It seems that the Department of Energy and Climate Change (DECC) *may* have learnt from its series of solar-related legal disputes. This time round, instead of taking immediate emergency action to revise subsidy rates the government has taken a rather more creative approach.

The UK government has called time on solar support, onshore wind and the Green Deal at a time when the country’s democratic machinery is in snooze mode. The industry has to make an even bigger noise in order to be heard and that process starts with you.

Earlier today DECC released its monthly stats for PV deployment in the UK. DECC is sizing the market as of 30 June 2015 at 7.75GW, and is putting Q2’15 deployment at approximately 200MW.