FITs End First Year With A Whimper And A Bang

In our last issue, we predicted that the Government's planned review of the Feed-In-Tariff (FIT) regime, announced in the CSR, would be brought forward and urged those looking to take advantage of the present rates to act quickly. Sure enough, the Government launched a review of the tariff in March – a year early - and changes to the scheme have been brought forward.

Two forms of technology have been targeted for immediate action and will see changes in tariff rates from August this year. Large scale Photovoltaic (PV) solar energy installations have been hit very hard, perhaps fatally for many planned projects, with cuts in the available tariff of around 40% for schemes above 50kW peak capacity and 70% for schemes above 250 kW.