Department for Business

The government’s Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy surveyed householders and small businesses and was told the prospect of firms having to pay higher taxes after installing PV prompted fury – just as the national solar trade body has been telling Whitehall for years.

The success of unsubsidized clean power facilities in the country – whether driven by corporate power purchase agreements or selling direct to the wholesale electricity market – has prompted the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy to ponder whether contracts-for-difference payments will be fit for purpose in the years ahead.

Developers dodged more onerous supply-chain and carbon-footprint commitments in the results of a recent consultation exercise announced by BEIS but appear set to lose all Contracts for Difference top-up payments during periods of negative electricity prices.

The government has commissioned a study into the feasibility of generating solar power in space and beaming the energy down to earth now that commercial space launches have changed the rules of the game.

The announcement by the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy of an auction which will include solar next year appears to back prime minister Boris Johnson’s claims to be serious about the nation’s net-zero carbon ambition.

The future benefits of technology such as smart meters and the associated aggregation of small scale generation are not being adequately rewarded, support for solar and wind is being cut off and parliament is fixated solely on one issue.

The managing director of London-based energy infrastructure company Statera has told pv magazine a clean energy grid in the U.K. will require as much flexible gas plant capacity as battery storage.

The latest government figures show utility scale solar had near-zero growth in 12 months. Although excluded from the Contracts for Difference procurement regime, large scale projects may experience a resurgence thanks to unsubsidized schemes linked to bilateral power supply deals, with the Solar Trade Association predicting 400 MW of such projects may be finalized this year.

An encouraging number of new installations at the end of 2018 was almost entirely accounted for by the smallest household systems and is probably down to the looming end of the FIT program, which appears to typify the story of British solar to date.

As the second anniversary of Britain’s vote to leave the EU approaches, the nature of the UK’s future energy relationship with the bloc is still very much unclear