Support for rooftop solar energy in the UK has just been cut, with subsidies for domestic projects slashed by nearly two-thirds – a little less than the 87 per cent threatened in the summer, but still disastrous. Can solar initiatives survive?
Rewind to early November. At a gathering for the opening of a community-energy conference in Ware, a Hertfordshire town about 30 kilometres north of London, there was every reason to feel like we had all run out of juice.
In August, chancellor George Osborne had effectively pulled the plug on community-owned generation of renewable electricity by revealing that he would slash the feed-in tariff (FIT) subsidy for solar photovoltaics, the sum paid for surplus energy exported to the grid.
This was a bitter blow and still is, despite the slight softening of the cuts unveiled yesterday. Solar PV is the cornerstone technology for many such projects. Our own energy cooperative, Hertford Energy Now (HEN), had already installed panels on one school and we had hoped to repeat the process on 12 more.
Like many community-energy groups, we were relying on the FIT to repay investors in the community who had helped raise funds to buy the panels. Then in October, Osborne also cut the tax incentives that had helped encourage those investors.
Together, these two actions seemed to strangle the hopes of many communities aiming to make their own electricity. One early casualty occurred in Balcombe in Sussex, where a community-energy group set up to counter a fracking threat had to pull out of its flagship solar farm. For HEN, the changes threatened almost …
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Dark days for solar power as UK subsidies are slashed
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