Investment in the UK’s distributed power generation market will significantly decline by 2019, according to a report published by GlobalData.
The report, Policy amendments leave the UK distributed power generation market in disarray, predicts that investment in distributed power (wind, PV and CHP) will drop from almost US$2.5 billion in 2013 to US$939 million by 2019.
The researchers predict that a decline in investment will start in 2016 due to a range of policy changes that will adversely impact the sector.
Ankit Mathur, GlobalData’s project manager for alternative energy, predicted that solar PV would be hit hardest by the dive in investment, blaming excessive and overlapping policies that will “create chaos in the UK’s solar PV distributed power generation market”.
The report claims that solar PV has the been main force behind the distributed sector’s growth, accounting for around 66% of the 3.67GW market in 2013, followed by CHP with 21% and 13% by wind.
Mathur continued: “As part of its solar PV strategy, the UK government aims to boost the small and medium-sized commercial solar PV distributed generation sector by encouraging rooftop installations on government properties, with a target of installing 1GW of capacity by 2020. However, only 75% of this target is likely to be achieved.”
The wider solar industry is also sceptical that the government can get any significant traction in the commercial solar sector in the short-term due to a number of barriers. Leonie Greene, the Solar Trade Association's head of external affairs explained: “There are several reasons why the big roof market is failing to take off significantly in the UK, chief among them being problems with the government’s support scheme. This needs to be fixed urgently, along with a wider range of non-financial barriers.”
Despite the dramatic drop in investment in the sector, GlobalData is predicting moderate growth for the UK distributed power market with capacity predicted to top 7GW by 2019.