Opinions

In a year when large-scale, ground-mounted solar dominated UK deployment, it may come as a surprise to many that the UK ended up in sixth position globally for the most solar PV capacity installed in the small-scale segment.

Now I don’t know if you were affected by the power cuts over the holiday period, but some of the media coverage regarding the power outages made me consider the attitude we have to our electricity supply.

2013 proved to be another tumultuous year for the solar industry in the UK, despite early optimism that the UK solar market had finally managed to secure a steady policy framework with sensible degressions, the EU anti-dumping investigation threw all this into disarray.

Ben Cosh of TGC Renewables explains why Treasury is missing the point; solar (balanced with gas) can still do the heavy lifting that offshore wind can do (balanced with gas), and at a cheaper cost.

Ian Lucas, MP for Wrexham, explains how “catastrophic” solar policy has caused Christmas heartache for 615 of his constituents

The ongoing saga surrounding energy bills in the UK is finally set to come to a head when George Osborne delivers the Autumn Statement on 5 December .

Potential Induced Degradation (PID) is a topic that’s been around the PV industry for a while, but until fairly recently I had not been paying it that much attention. This changed for me at Solar Energy UK 2013 in Birmingham when a manufacturer giving a talk said they had seen evidence of PID reducing output in a particular system by 60% – yes 60%!

The UK has more than 4GW of PV projects in the pipeline but the majority is at the mercy of local planning authorities.

The Prime Minister’s pledge to “roll back green charges” put the whole green industry in a tailspin. Thankfully, despite Michael Fallon’s best efforts, the Department of Energy and Climate Change has confirmed that none of solar’s support mechanisms will be included in Cameron’s ‘green levies review’. Here’s a roundup of some of the best tweets as the industry was dragged through the latest twist and turns of the ‘solarcoaster’.

The news that Hinkley Point achieved a strike price of £92.50 per MWh, nearly four times the amount originally proposed, cannot but rankle with the British solar industry.