Over 150 businesses coming mainly from the solar industry, have came together to warn David Cameron of the threat to Britain’s solar industry.
A letter to Downing Street from a wide coalition of both big and small businesses, including household names, such as IKEA, has asked the Prime Minister to back the UK solar industry. Signatories include Triodos Bank, Ecotricity, KYOCERA, Interface, Good Energy and the Centre for Renewable Energy Systems Technology at Loughborough University.
The letter was signed by a host of small businesses involved in solar, showing how the industry is made up of over 2,000 small and medium sized businesses who support 16,000 jobs – in stark contrast to the Big Six utilities.
The letter comes on the day the Department for Energy and Climate Change (DECC) closes its consultation on proposed changes to support for solar power. The proposals are already having a damaging effect on parts of the solar industry.
The letter highlights the critical importance of commercial and industrial roofs, as well as solar farms, in delivering low-cost solar. It urges the Prime Minister to secure the UK industry with an eye on the £78 billion per annum global solar market anticipated in 2020. The signatories underline the very positive benefits that solar parity will deliver for UK businesses including improving international competitiveness, lower energy price inflation and improved electricity sector competition.
Despite the vision set out in DECC’s own Solar PV Strategy of solar booming across large roofs, the Solar Trade Association (STA), who organised the letter, say that the current policy framework is not enabling this to happen. The STA also argues that the DECC consultation which closes today on Feed-In Tariffs (FITs), a support scheme essential to the success of roof-top schemes, doesn’t address the policy failure on mid-large solar roofs.
STA chief executive, Paul Barwell, said:
“Solar is a home-grown solution to Britain’s energy crisis. If the government provides a stable policy environment solar will soon be subsidy free. But the government is now proposing to tilt the playing field against large-scale solar, while not taking sufficient action to unlock commercial rooftop solar – that is unacceptable.
“We urge DECC not to close the Renewables Obligation to large-scale solar and to rethink proposals on FITs to allow a meaningful rooftop market which its own Solar PV Strategy recognises has such tremendous potential.
“The level of policy uncertainty risks derailing the extraordinary progress the large-scale industry has made in delivering jobs and reducing technology costs in the last few years. It is also putting the UK’s position in the booming global solar market at risk.
“So serious are the implications of these consultations for the British solar industry that we are asking the Prime Minister to intervene. We only need one more push, one more period of policy stability to be able to compete with fossil fuels without support. That is the global race the PM needs to win for the UK economy and the climate.”
The two DECC consultations focus on controlling spending for large-scale PV within the Renewables Obligation and ‘promoting the deployment of midscale building-mounted solar PV’ under the FIT.
However, the STA says that DECC’s claims that large-scale solar is a threat to the Renewables Obligation budget are ill-founded given solar currently accounts for just five per cent of Renewables Obligation expenditure. The National Audit Office has recently criticised DECC for awarding 58% of the entire 2020 renewables budget to just seven projects (six of which are more expensive than solar power).
In addition, DECC’s proposals to ‘promote’ the deployment of rooftop solar under FITs are wide off the mark on the essential changes necessary to enable the take-off of roof-top solar. The STA is urging DECC to produce a new consultation that properly addresses the barriers to roof-top solar deployment.
The letter was due to be handed over to Downing Street at noon on Monday July 7.