Solar Power Portal launches Utility Solar Summit event, new subsidy-free solar campaign

Solar Power Portal is delighted to announce the launch of the inaugural Utility Solar Summit, charting the UK’s return to gigawatt-scale solar deployment.

And to mark the event’s launch, SPP will be launching a content campaign on the site later this month, detailing the driving factors behind the market’s revival.

Utility Solar Summit (UK) is a collaboration between the editorial and market research teams at Solar Power Portal. The event will feature critical insights from those developing new, unsubsidised assets, featuring sessions on project pipelines, economic feasibility, ‘mega’ solar sites of 100MW and above, and cutting edge PV technologies.

The event will take place in central London from 10 – 11 June 2020, timed to coincide with the return to construction of some of the UK’s solar mainstays.

SPP is also delighted to announce that the event will be supported by high-efficiency module manufacturer Suntech.

Writing on SPP today, Solar Media’s head of market research Finlay Colville has detailed how the country’s utility-scale solar pipeline has swelled to more than 6GW in recent months, and is forecasting for as much as 1.5GW to be deployed before the end of the year.

“The UK was a leading market for large-scale solar farms in Europe in the past, when incentives were the driving factor. As the price of modules has tumbled over the past few years, coupled with the growing need for a greater share of energy coming from renewables within the UK, the domestic utility sector is now prime for deployment,” Colville said.

“The expected GW-scale build-out during 2020 is now coming from new sites that have been devloped post-subsidy, with site sizes typically 30MW and above. The Utility Solar Summit event is occuring at the perfect time in the UK as deals are done on sites under contruction or at the shovel-ready stage.”

In the build-up to the summit, Solar Power Portal will be running a content campaign to celebrate the UK’s return to a concentrated build-out phase. That campaign will collate expert insight, market intelligence, case studies and developing news coverage into one section of the site.

“While the actual deployment of utility-scale solar all but ground to halt after the RO’s closure in 2017, the UK market has retained considerable insight and expertise, perhaps best evidenced by how many of the country’s home-grown talent and companies have experienced huge successes overseas,” Liam Stoker, editor-in-chief at Solar Media, said.

“That expertise is now being used to fine tune business models, select best-in-class technologies and bring forward utility-scale solar farms once again, placing the UK very much back on the agenda of the global solar economy. The Utility Solar Summit and Solar Power Portal will provide exhaustive detail as to how that return is taking place, and how to be a part of it.”

More detail on the Utility Solar Summit can be found here, with a draft agenda ready to download. Selected sponsorship opportunities remain and enquiries can be sent here. The Utility Solar Summit will be an exclusive two-day event and ticketing purchases can be made online here.