Search sponsor
The UK’s Department of Energy and Climate Change (DECC) has released the official quarterly statistics for solar installations in 2012. Under the newly-introduced capacity trigger mechanism, the level of installations recorded in May, June and July inform the feed-in tariff (FiT) rates for November 1.
As a result, the FiT rates in the UK from November 1 will be as follows:
| Digression Band | Tariff band | Deployment level | Digression rate | FiT tariff from November 1 |
| 0-10kW | ≤4kW | 163.77MW | 3.5% | 15.44p |
| >4-10kW | 3.5% | 13.99p | ||
| >10-50kW | >10-50kW | 57.09MW | 3.5% | 13.03p |
| >50kW-5MW | >50-100kW | 13.94MW | 0.0% | 11.5p |
| >100-150kW | 0.0% | 11.5p | ||
| >150-250kW | 0.0% | 11p | ||
| >250kW-5MW | 0.0% | 7.1p | ||
| Stand-alone | 0.0% | 7.1p |
The announcement of the upcoming FiT rate digression for those installations that lie between 0-50kW follows disappointing installation figures as a result of the introduction of a lower FiT rate in August.
The installation rate dropped by 87% following the slashing of the domestic FiT rate from £0.21/kWh down to £0.16/kWh. When the new £0.1544/kWh rate is introduced in November, it will complete a 65% decrease in the available FiT rate over the last six months.
Despite the swingeing cuts to the available feed-in tariff rates, the UK market is still continuing to perform strongly – installing 260MW in Q3’12.
Large-scale solar installations are also experiencing a significant renaissance in the UK under the Renewable Obligation (RO) scheme, which supports installations >5MW. The UK government recently announced that it would keep its level of support for large-scale solar at 2ROCs until April 2013, whilst it consults further over future support for solar technology.
