So they do listen!

The coalition government has struggled with renewables; falling out repeatedly with the industry and creating damaging uncertainty for investors by continually moving the goalposts and changing policy direction.
However, they have been more or less consistent on solar farms and the new Environment Secretary Liz Truss hammered the final nail into their coffin this week calling them ‘a blight on the landscape’.
The renewables industry hoped she would be more sympathetic than her predecessor Owen Paterson – who has now gone completely rogue by calling on the government to tear up the Climate Change Act – but she has kept up his attack on solar farms by scrapping subsidies for any new developments.
Chris Huhne drastically reduced the Feed-in-Tariff for solar power when he was Climate Change Minister and this latest announcement marks the end of a steady erosion of a misguided policy, which dates back to the previous Labour administration.
Credit
I am not claiming too much credit here, but B&ES (we were the HVCA back then) warned the government that solar farms would suck up a huge proportion of the public subsidy available for solar power in this blog in March 2011: ‘Farms are for food – not solar panels’.
It took a while for the penny to drop, but it was clear from the outset that, if farmers could make more money from FITs than from growing food, they would hand over their fields to the solar speculators.
The subsidies were designed to create a market for solar power by encouraging householders and small businesses to install panels on their roofs and, therefore, generate electricity close to the point of use and benefit directly themselves. Instead – and who can blame savvy financial investors from seizing the opportunity – commercial organisations saw them as a source of profit.
Prices
The UK now has more than 250 solar farms, which have pushed more of our food production overseas contributing to rising prices. And as I said at the time:
‘The FIT scheme was not intended to be an alternative to the equities markets, but to stimulate the generation of household renewable power. [Huhne] is, rightly, concerned that the subsidies are, instead, making their way into the pockets of so-called “shrewd investors”…’
I also warned that they risked putting the solar energy industry into reverse if they were too draconian with their cuts to the FiTs scheme – which is precisely what happened. However, getting solar panels out of the countryside and onto otherwise underused roof space was the right thing to do.
Perhaps, in this case at least, the government was listening to the industry.