INRG Solar has announced that it expects to build over 100MW of solar in 2014/15 across the UK.
The company says that it has a pipeline of projects for the year which vary in size from 5MW right up to 50MW.
Despite the government’s recent move to limit the exceptional growth of solar farms in the UK, INRG Solar has revealed that it already has the capacity for 200MW of new projects in 2015/16 – with grid connection already secured on these sites.
The Department of Energy and Climate Change (DECC) is proposing to remove renewable obligation support for all projects over 5MW from 2015, putting increased focus on those projects with capacity close to 5MW.
David Dean, INRG Solar’s commercial manager said: “It is great news that we have secured private funding for our continued development of UK solar farms into the next year. We have a healthy pipeline but as always we are keen to add to it with 5MW sites and above. The 5MW sites are very attractive at the moment and we are having an increase in enquiries of these 12 hectare size developments.”
However, DECC has warned in its consultation over changes to large-scale solar’s support that it could move to block RO support for solar under 5MW too if deployment continued to increase at a pace it was uncomfortable with. DECC states that it “may need to consider applying stricter controls than those proposed in this consultation document if evidence indicates that solar PV deployment poses a bigger budgetary threat than we estimated at the time that we launched this consultation”.
The UK is predicted to be Europe’s largest solar market in 2014 due in large part to the exceptional growth of the large-scale, ground-mount solar sector.