The UK government will reduce the feed-in tariff (FiT) for domestic-scale solar to GBP 0.0439 per kWh, a smaller cut than had been proposed.
The Department of Energy and Climate Change (DECC) today announced revised FiTs for small-scale wind and solar systems which are higher, in most cases, than what the government proposed in the summer. The government will also reintroduce pre-accreditation for solar PV and wind generators over 50 kW and all hydro and anaerobic digestion generators.
The department also confirmed that the Renewables Obligation (RO) scheme across Great Britain will close to new solar photovoltaic (PV) projects at 5 MW and below from April 1, 2016. The measures, announced after recent consultations, are designed to deal with the projected over-allocation of renewable energy subsidies, DECC said.
The new PV FiT rates are shown in the table below:
| Installed capacity |
Consultation tariffs |
New tariffs (Jan 2016) |
| <10kW |
0.0163 |
0.0439 |
| 10-50kW |
0.0369 |
0.0459 |
| 50-250kW |
0.0264 |
0.0270 |
| 250-1000kW |
0.0228 |
0.0227 |
| > 1000k |
0.0103 |
0.0087 |
| Stand alone |
0.0103 |
0.0087 |
The new wind FiT rates:
| Installed capacity |
Consultation tariffs |
New tariffs (Jan 2016) |
| <50kW |
0.0861 |
0.0854 |
| 50-100kW |
0.0452 |
0.0854 |
| 100–1500kW |
0.0452 |
0.0546 |
| >1500kW |
0.00 |
0.0086 |
New applications to the FIT scheme will be paused from January 15 to February 8 to allow time for the changes to be brought into effect. There will be deployment caps to limit new FiT spending to GBP 100 million (USD 150m/EUR 138m) per year up to April 2019.
DECC announced a proposed review of the FiT scheme at the end of August. The Solar Trade Association (STA) has warned the proposed cuts of up to 87% of the solar FiTs could lead to 27,000 job losses.
In addition to confirming the closure of the RO to below 5 MW solar, after the scheme was closed to large-scale solar projects this year, DECC said there will be a grace period for developers who made a significant financial commitment on or before July 22 and developers who experience grid delay beyond their control. Grandfathering will be removed from July 22 for solar projects in England and Wales with an exception for those which meet the significant financial commitment criteria.
"My priority is to ensure energy bills for hardworking families and businesses are kept as low as possible whilst ensuring there is a sensible level of support for low carbon technologies that represent value for money," said energy secretary Amber Rudd.
(GBP 1.0 = USD 1.495/EUR 1.377)
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Solar on the roof. Author: Marufish. License: Creative Commons, Attribution-ShareAlike 2.0 Generic.
