Question to the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy:

To ask the Secretary of State for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy, what assessment his Department has made of the industrial benefits of solar power.

Solar power is a UK success story, with rapid deployment over the last 7 years. Latest figures indicate that we now have over 12.5GW of solar capacity installed in the UK, enough to power over 2.7 million homes and exceeding our historic projections.

Costs for solar installations have fallen rapidly during this period, allowing both domestic and industrial consumers to benefit from increasingly cheap and clean electricity. We expect subsidy-free solar to be an increasingly attractive option, with the first subsidy-free UK solar farm recently deploying. Some of the UK’s largest solar developers have said that they will be installing and connecting subsidy-free sites over the next 12 months.