Solar deployment figures branded ‘inaccurate’

The Solar Trade Association (STA) has criticised “meaningless” solar deployment statistics published by the Department for Business Energy and Industrial Strategy (BEIS) yesterday.

The figures confirmed the slump in the level of capacity since last March’s closure of the government’s Feed-in-Tariff (FiT) scheme, showing 2,644 installations last month – 4.5% fewer than during the same month last year.

However, these installations equated to a total increase in generation capacity of 7.5MW, which was 40% lower than the level recorded in July 2018.

The main reason for the mismatch in the level of generation and number of installations is that 2,339 (88%) of the latter are small scale devices with a capacity of under 4kW.

The drop in the rate of installations follows the expiry of the government’s FiT scheme, which provided a guaranteed payment to owners of small scale renewable energy installations for each kwh of electricity generated.  At the same time, the government withdrew the export tariff.

The STA called on BEIS to implement the recommendations of the Energy Data Taskforce which includes introducing a generation asset registration system. It said this was the only approach that would enable truly accurate monitoring of solar PV and battery storage deployment.

STA chief executive Chris Hewett said: “It is time for BEIS to either get its house in order or stop publishing these meaningless statistics which clearly do not capture the full picture of UK PV deployment.

“We are particularly concerned with the large-scale commercial and industrial rooftop PV market, as these systems are too large to be captured by MCS registration. Our members are seeing significant growth across this space, from supermarket rooftops to football stadiums, and the lack of visibility of this capacity is holding back energy system innovation and decarbonisation.

“As the Energy Data Taskforce stated in their report earlier this year, an estimated 10 per cent of assets are not visible to the electricity system operator today. How will we know if we are on track to reach Net Zero if the government cannot even be certain of what is connected to the grid? This clearly demonstrates the urgent need for a coordinated asset registration strategy, and a centralised energy data catalogue that is accessible to industry. We reiterate our call upon government and respective agencies to swiftly implement the recommendations of the Energy Data Taskforce.”