Clive Lewis – 2016 Parliamentary Question to the Department for Energy and Climate Change

The below Parliamentary question was asked by Clive Lewis on 2016-05-23.

To ask the Secretary of State for Energy and Climate Change, what her policy is on her Department’s April 2014 Solar Strategy document.

Andrea Leadsom

Solar is a UK success story: since the previous Government’s April 2014 Solar Strategy was published, we’ve more than doubled the capacity of UK solar, and industry expect that we have already exceeded the forecast of 10GW by 2020 made in that document.

However, the position of this Government is clear: we can only expect bill payers to support low carbon power if costs are controlled; subsidy should be temporary, not part of a permanent business model; and as costs come down, as they have for solar, so should support.

We are encouraged by the way the solar industry is responding to the policy changes we have made in order to control costs: deployment of solar under the revised FIT scheme continues and several developers are putting together models to encourage their customers to install solar without subsidy – the models needed to create a sustainable sector for years to come.