National Grid chief executive Steve Holliday has said that government cuts to renewable energy subsidies will not disrupt the UK’s shift away from centralised power towards distributed generation.
In an interview with World Energy Focus, Holliday said the energy industry was undergoing a “tremendous transformation” towards distributed generation, adding that the traditional concept of large centralised power plants generating baseload power was “outdated”.
Holliday added that there was no longer a “one size fits all” market consumer who “wants to interact with energy in many different ways”, arguing that microgrids and distributed generation networks were the future.
Sweeping cuts to renewable energy subsidies under the feed-in tariff (FiT), proposed by the government earlier this month, also include caps on the amount of FiT-supported solar that can be installed in the UK. But while the solar industry has said the cuts threaten to undermine the future of the UK solar industry, Holliday voiced his belief that the continued migration towards more distributed generation was inevitable.
“The pace of that development is uncertain. That depends on political decisions, regulatory incentives, consumer preferences, technological developments. But the direction is clear,” he said.
Holliday also revealed that three of the National Grid’s modelled scenarios include more than 20GW of solar capacity by 2035. Former energy minister and now BPVA president Greg Barker had previously aimed for the same capacity to be installed by 2020.