The Department of Energy and Climate Change’s latest solar deployment figures for September, released today, are missing what is claimed to be a significant amount of solar deployed under the accredited ROO-FiT.

Figures for September reveal that while DECC has appeared to have caught up with the amount of utility-scale solar deployed under the RO in Q1, it has missed out on deployment under ROO-FiT as developers have flocked to the method in the wake of the RO’s closure.

Today’s figures claim that just 73MW has been added in the first nine months of 2015 under ROO-FiTs, a sub-section which comprises all rooftop installations above 50kW in size and anything ground-mounted which receives feed-in tariff payments.

When the RO was in force deployment under the ROO-FiT was understood to be low however Finlay Colville, head of market intelligence at Solar Intelligence, noted that this is now not the case.

“Anyone that has spent just a few hours in the UK talking to installers will know instantly this [DECC’s ROO-FiT figure] is grossly incorrect,” Colville said, adding that the time lag on ROO-FiT deployment appearing on monthly figures appears “even worse than the RO installs” and could be as bad as two years in some cases.

Furthermore, the proposed changes to ROs and FiTs have also stimulated the ROO-FiT portion to record levels in the past few months as a possible cliff-edge approaches.

“The net result is that, once again, DECC’s figures are missing much of what has been happening in the industry in the past few quarters, and actual figures are running considerably higher than the latest estimates from the government.

“With so much riding on all parties having a clear visibility of what the solar industry has achieved across the different funding mechanisms, during the current consultation periods for RO and FiTs, once again we appear to returning to the days of inaccurate market tracking,” Colville added.

Solar Intelligence is to release its own independent estimates for deployment under the ROO-FiT for the first nine months of 2015 in the coming days.