Opinions

The opposition day defeat has left the solar industry with little option but to brace itself and prepare for the introduction of the new 21p/kWh rate proposed by the Government.

Any ideas of properly determining how quick the TrinaMount system really is has been dashed by the weather this week. Thanks to very high winds, it’s been a real stop-start operation … just too dangerous to handle the PV modules at times.

Thanks to the December 12th FIT deadline its all hands to the pump here – and I am back on the tools for a few weeks. This week’s project is a 50kWp installation on the metal roof of a local auction mart.

Now we have all got over the shock announcement of potential changes to the FiT some people in the industry are saying we should just get on and make the 21p work.

BBC’s panorama show on Monday night was billed as an investigation into the truth behind the UK's rocketing energy bills. Surely a rational, unbiased report from the BBC’s well-respected Panorama show would present the benefits of solar PV and other renewable energies to the wider public, while sensibly explaining the implicit costs to the consumer of supporting such technologies – wouldn’t it?

Greg Barker is misunderstood. He has come under heavy criticism from those within and without the solar industry in the UK and I can see why. It is never easy to be the hatchet man when there is a tight budget in the offing and it is even more difficult to know deep down that the system (political and economic) you are forced to work with is far from ideal and constantly places you between a rock and a hard place.

The announcement this week from the Department of Energy and Climate Change (DECC) on solar feed-in tariffs (FiT) came as shock to the solar industry. But this shock wasn’t just from the FiT reduction, as Government had widely flagged its intention to reduce the subsidy designed to make solar panel installations economically viable – even if the size of the cut was larger than had been hoped.

Last week the Solar Power UK conference was held in Birmingham and the keynote speaker was Greg Barker, Minister for Energy and Climate Change. It was rumoured that he would make a ‘big’ announcement but, in the end, this did not happen. The announcement was leaked in the following days and was finally released by DECC on Monday  October 31. The result: a large cut in feed-in tariff rates from the end of this year.

At the opening of SMA’s UK HQ, Marko Werner Chief Sales and Marketing Officer & Board Member of PV inverter market leader SMA Solar Technology AG and Henry Dziuba, the Managing Director of SMA Solar UK Limited, spoke about the ramifications of the impending FiT cuts.

On October 14 I made a prediction on what I thought about the nature of the pending FiT cuts. As it turns out, that prediction was correct, and I would now like to help members of the industry…