In November 2011 the UK government made an unexpected announcement: solar subsidies were to be slashed in half.
At the time Brighton Energy Coop was gearing up to launch one of the UK’s first community solar schemes. Two days before our launch we were forced to put the project on hold.
It was a heavy blow for the team who had spent the best part of eighteen months developing the business plan, setting up the BEC organisation and negotiating with sites around Brighton.
Since then many things have changed. The price of solar has more than halved as demand for solar has boomed worldwide. Meanwhile, the subsidy (the feed in tariff or FIT) has also halved, and regular cuts are now commonplace. The latest FIT regime requires buildings to also achieve a certain level of energy efficiency to qualify.
To add to the drama the government was also taken to court over November’s FIT cut. They appealed first to the High Court and then the Supreme Court – and eventually lost in February of this year. Consequently thousands of installations qualified for the higher rate – even though the deadline had long expired.
Brighton Energy Coop has carefully monitored these developments. The constantly changing FIT landscape has created a constantly changing landscape of installations. For the past six months installation figures across the country have varied wildly as different FIT regimes have come and gone:
This has created a familiar cycle: a period when solar is unviable, moving into viability as prices fall, followed by a reduction in subsidies causing the cycle to start again.
We are now in the second phase of the current cycle, leading towards July 2012 when another FIT change is due. As such the continually falling price of solar means that our project – put on hold in November – is now workable again. Our installer partners have worked hard to deliver us fantastic low solar prices and we have been working with local energy assessors to ensure that our sites meet energy efficiency requirements.
We see the period until July as another window within which to get PV on the rooftops of Brighton. It’s been a long and complicated road, but one which has only increased our knowledge and expertise around solar. BEC remains a fantastic opportunity for community engagement in renewable energy – click here to see you can get involved.
