MSE News: Legal threats over solar subsidy cuts

Bin_Boy

I personally think this is good news and was bound to happen, for the following reasons:

1) Announcing a cut off date 6 weeks in the future for something which is a substantial cost for most people and for which installation has a substantial lead time cannot be seen as reasonable or fair. Many people will have already committed to the purchase on the basis of previous tariffs with no consultation or awareness of the proposed changes.

2) The current government seems to have a distinct lack of understanding of the word consultation. A consultation implies that you ask peoples opinion over a period of time and take into account their responses ( I appreciate this may not be the dictionary definition, but it is certainly the moral definition which a democratically elected government should apply). To have a consultation date end after the date for implementation is nonsense and unlawful. This is a further example of the government changing legislation without lawful consultation, they have lost at least 2 high court decisions in respect of planning legislation on this. The NHS similarly has just been found wanting in the same regard, and most local authorities and other government bodies have taken a very 'relaxed' approach to consultation related to employment law.

It is right that the proposal is subject to legal challenge, and the government should rightly be found wanting. The only sad thing is that it will cost a lot of taxpayers money in legal expenses purely because neither our MP's or the boffins at the DCLG are smart enough to realise that the consultation should end before you implement something.


On a separate note I still cannot see why they have taken this approach rather than placing a reasonable limit on the number of panels which can be registered to one company/person for fits purposes (or make it so once you reach a threshold across multiple properties the reduced rate applies). I don't particularly think the FIT payments should stay at the current amount, so long as it continues to make installations viable (which in my view the current proposal won't) but it seems to target genuine installations rather than the issue which the consultation and changes were supposed to address.

zeupater

Hi All

At the reduced rate installations will be viable and there's plenty of room for further reductions in equipment prices further down the line .....

Regarding the questions as to why such a short timespan between notification and cutoff .... well, when the German government telegraphed the cut in their FiTs months before the summer 2010 date there was total chaos throughout the whole european supply chain as tens of thousands in Germany jumped on the bandwaggon at the same time ....

There was a point regarding a fixed tariff depending on installed capacity too ..... I suppose that the troglodites would be up for this one ... solar panels in a cave .... seriously, if you're going to subsidise a capital inefficient way to generate electricity, why would you not plan to at least make it preferrential to subsidise the most efficient orientations & locations first and that's just what the current system encourages .... I'd rather subsidise a south facing 2kWp based on generation than one which could face any direction and receive a fixed subsidy based on nominal capacity ...

HTH
Z

davidgmmafan

"Cardew, it's not cutting the budget, just the amount paid per installation. The same budget will be spread over more installations"

Yes and the money was going to run out pretty quickly without these changes. I also hear Huhne was asked to say how much this is costing and didn't do so.

jimjames

rogerblack wrote: »

I note that Tesco will be making some profit from this, so presumably it's possible for installers to bring in panels at under the 8K mark.

I had a call from an installer today and their opening line was "we have dropped our prices so that they are still viable with the new FIT rates". My current installation is borderline viable with the new rates anyway so if prices drop further I can see the industry still continuing but perhaps with a slightly lower number of installations.

Cardew

jamesd wrote: »

Cardew, it's not cutting the budget, just the amount paid per installation. The same budget will be spread over more installations.

Exactly my point.

If you were buying widgets for £1 each, and the price was reduced to 50p, you would get twice as many widgets for the same money.

We - the electricity customers - are paying huge subsidies, that are completely unjustified, to people producing [STRIKE]widgets[/STRIKE] solar electricity. So by cutting FIT by 50%, for the same amount of subsidy we will get twice as much solar electricity produced.

Bear in mind that the Government have committed to producing a certain amount of solar electricity to meet treaty obligations; not committed to a certain spend on solar.

If all that matters was the budget spend, then to follow your logic it wouldn't matter if we spent that budget on a couple of solar installations and paid them, say £10k per kWh.

Cardew

Brian99 wrote: »

Cardew - you have some very valid points... having a large solar farm in Sunny South makes sense... but it would need enormous wires on enormous pylons, going up to Scotland.

Part of the value of home systems is to avoid extra pylons everywhere. It is , yes, expensive, but I guess when hardware is cheaper, people will be happy to pay for their own installations. (We might need big batteries to store energy for the evening, when they are cheaper.)

I am sorry but that is a complete misunderstanding of the situation.

Solar PV panels produce no electricity as soon as the sun goes over the horizon. So they do not reduce the UK's electricity generating capacity by a single watt - we still need exactly the same amount of coal/gas/oil/nuclear power stations.

The peak load on the UK's electricity grid is on a winter's evening when solar is producing zilch.

The same 'enormous wires and pylons' that carry electricity to all parts of the UK(including Scotland) are not affected by wherever solar is generated. Indeed when the UK generating capacity is under strain we get our electricity supplemented by Nuclear electricity produced in France and transmitted to UK by means of a seriously enormous wire(the interconnector) that comes ashore in Kent - a long way South of Hadrian's Wall.

redux

Martin Lewis, MoneySavingExpert.com creator, says: "Surely a fairer system would've been to simply say that anyone who has signed up and paid before the announcement will get the higher feed in tariff as expected."

No, surely it would have been fairer never to have designed this ludicrous scheme in the first place.

I haven't studied the numbers in detail, but I believe that people are paid about a lot more for the electricity their panels generate than they are charged if they buy some.

Someone I know was offered a quarter of a million upfront then about £100,000 a year to have some panels on some land. That sounds impressive, until you wonder why those firms don't just buy the land cheaper than that. Answer, I suspect, perhaps they don't have the money themselves and someone else would be paying. Either that or they'd go broke well before the end.

John_Pierpoint

Cardew wrote: »

The same 'enormous wires and pylons' that carry electricity to all parts of the UK(including Scotland) are not affected by wherever solar is generated.

Not quite true:
We need to build "a second grid" for two main reasons:

Sustainable sources of electricity (especially nuclear power and off shore wind) are not well connected to the existing grid, power generation is moving from inland coalfield sites to coastal or highland locations..

As the grid(s) get "decarbonised" the future will be electric, not fossil fuel - so demand for electricity will increase.

That is the theory, personally I will be pushing up the daisies, not plugging in my car for its overnight charge.

Brian99_2

No Solar after dark: I'm sure they are working on the best solution to this.
The obvious one is Hydro-electric power, which is easy to switch on and off.

You dont need them when loads of solar panels are generating. Then they start switching on as the sun goes down. This is what they do when everyone swiches on kettles during TV commercial breaks.

More Hydro will be needed, and its clean too

rogerblack

Hydro in the volumes needed is not 'clean'.
If you want to store solar power to supply the national grid for an day - 1500GWh, you need to raise a cubic kilometer of water by 500 meters. (or ten cubic kilometers by 50m,...)

This pretty much means you're going to be flooding large parts of the mountainous countryside, if there is even enough.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dinorwig_Power_Station - for example - stores around 10GWh.
You'd need 60 of these. (they are not 100% efficient)
Assuming they can be built at a similar price, in todays money, that'd cost about 3.3 billion per, or 180 billion total, to install the required storage.