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 government has suggested PV plant operators accept a ‘voluntary’ 12.5% reduction in feed-in tariffs. If developers refuse, policymakers could impose 15-25% cuts, albeit with payment contracts extended five years. The drastic measures are being considered to reduce the cost of the state-owned Guaranteed Buyer body, which purchases all electricity generated in Ukraine from renewable energy facilities.
With the European Commission claiming its €100 billion ‘Just Transition’ fund will ease EU coal mining regions into a post-fossil-fuel future energy system, Adam Smith considers what happened in one deprived area of Britain when government policy failed to support talk of clean energy ambitions.
The annual installed PV capacity for Japan is expected to be 7 GW (DC) in 2019, according to RTS Corp. Cumulative PV installed capacity now stands at 63 GW. In addition to the robust introduction of small-scale PV projects, the development of already approved large-scale PV projects under the FIT program was advanced by the end of the year, say RTS analysts Takashi Ohigashi and Izumi Kaizuka.
The transition from a feed-in tariff scheme to an auction mechanism may take longer than expected in the Southeast Asian country, as the Ministry of Industry and Trade is considering maintaining FITs of $0.0709/kWh to $0.0769/kWh for projects that secured approval before Nov. 23, 2019, if they come online as scheduled by the end of this year. According to law firm Lexcomm Vietnam, there are currently 3 GW of projects with licenses.
The generous tariff is considered crucial by the Vietnamese government to maintain high levels of development in the rooftop segment until 2021.
The analyst expects the final figure for new PV generation capacity in 2019 to top out at 20-24 GW thanks to the delayed introduction of a new solar policy, land scarcity, financing problems and grid connection issues. There are clouds on the horizon too, with China set to remain wedded to coal for the foreseeable future.
The draft feed-in tariff scheme should be approved by the end of the month. Payments for residential solar systems are expected to fall only 0.34% but those for utility scale solar may be reduced by 2.2%. An increase is set to be granted to projects in remote areas and also to those which rely on high-efficiency modules.
Analysts at Fitch Solutions have published a report singling out Spain and Brazil as ‘outperformers’ in the global solar market and labelled Vietnam the “market to watch”. The analysts expect surging growth from the Southeast Asian nation to continue in the coming decade.
Prime minister Su Tseng-chang announced the ambition and said the new solar plan for 2019-20 will bring investment and business opportunities of around US$7.5 billion.
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