Question

To ask the Secretary of State for Energy and Climate Change, what estimate he has made of likely changes in the number of 50kW and over rooftop solar installations deployed in each year from 2015-16 to 2020-21 as a result of changes to feed-in tariffs announced by his Department on 2 October 2014.

The intention of the Feed-in-Tariffs (FITs) policy change announced on 2 October 2014 is to help ensure that building mounted installations - which can help to reduce energy bills, deliver a reduction in pressure on the electricity grid, build on the UK supply chain, result in greater on-site use and support additional jobs – do not suffer from tariff degressions as a result of ground-mounted installations. It is one of a package of measures which the Government is implementing with the aim of ensuring the building mounted sector is well placed to deploy, whilst at the same challenged to innovate and bringing down costs. Estimates of the impact on deployment of 50kW and over rooftop solar installations were set out in the accompanying Impact Assessment (see Table 7):

https://www.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/360306/FITs_solar_IA_MASTER.pdf.

This showed that the impact on cumulative deployment to 2020/21 is estimated to range from -150MW to +90MW.