Jessica Laporte explores the impact of scaling back incentives in a country that has led from the front in recent years.
Since 2010, Conservative discourse on renewable energy has firmly criticised the green add-on to utility bills as an unnecessary burden to the taxpayer. Tory ministers have highlighted the unanticipated success of the Feed-In Tariff (FiT) and suggested that this shows just how competitive and therefore cost-efficient solar energy could be if the sector was independent. This month, the DECC announced the end of the Renewables Obligation (RO) for small-scale solar farms from as early as April 2016.
The announcement has been criticised by many in the solar sector as a significant step backwards in the quest to help Britain achieve its EU targets of generating at least 15% of its energy via renewable energy sources. With cuts to domestic solar inevitable we ask; where has solar really triumphed and what must the government learn from it?
FiT 2014 highlights: Wales beat England
The 2010 FiT was pivotal in Britain’s crusade against climate change as hundreds of thousands more homes embraced solar energy than originally expected. In a new report, The Eco Experts have compiled a series of heat maps which illustrate the uptake of photovoltaic panel installations across the country using data from the Central Feed-in Tariff Register for 2014.
