solar pv

Liam Stoker offers his opinion on a Clean Growth Strategy that embraced renewables and changed BEIS’ rhetoric for the better, but cast solar into the long grass once again.

All low carbon technologies should be able to access the same markets and compete on an equal basis for contracts according to the National Infrastructure Commission (NIC), whose latest policy consultation flies in the face of the government’s Clean Growth Strategy (CGS).

The Confederation of British Industry has added to the growing number of bodies, associations and other third parties to call for the inclusion of mature technologies in future auctions.

Sadiq Khan has today opened London’s first community energy fund for solar projects, offering £400,000 over four years to support community energy groups overcome the challenges in getting project off the ground.

An ambitious project to convert the “grey fleet” of a care home for old folk in Scotland to a sustainable “green fleet”, using solar PV and battery energy storage, was winner of the Residential, Commercial and Industrial-scale Storage Project category at last week’s Solar Power Portal Awards. Andy Colthorpe spoke with the project’s senior design engineer, Jonothan Oxford of Wattstor.

This morning the government’s long-awaited Clean Growth Strategy was finally published to a mixed response from the renewables lobby. Here we have collated some of the leading commentary so far.

Kiwi Power is to finance and develop a battery storage project at an energy site including solar in south Wales, where it will provide constant grid services availability to National Grid for two years in a first for the aggregator.

The Solar Trade Association (STA) has responded strongly to a lack of solar policy announcements within today’s Clean Growth Strategy reveal, arguing that the government is “artificially holding back” the technology.

The UK solar industry has been made to wait on future government action after the long-awaited Clean Growth Strategy deferred relevant decisions for the technology until later this year.

Leading renewables investors and the Solar Trade Association have written to energy secretary Greg Clark, urging him to end solar’s spell in the Contracts for Difference wilderness.