UKIP

Cut off the Subsidies, and the Wind Weasels Scurry! Great!

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Britain’s uncertain renewables policy puts off investors

Decision to bring forward cap on solar power projects and mixed

signals on renewables support sees the UK slip down EY’s ranking

Uncertainty about Government support for renewable energy has meant the UK has become less attractive to investors

Uncertainty about Government support for renewable energy has meant the UK has become less attractive to investors Photo: ALAMY

The UK has slipped down the rankings of global destinations for investors in renewable energy because of policy uncertainty leading into next year’s election, according to EY.

The conflicting signals over the future of support for renewables beyond the 2015 election and the proposed cap on solar power projects eligible for support being brought in earlier than planned has meant the attractiveness of UK’s renewables market has fallen back to the levels last seen in November 2012. EY’s Renewable Energy Country Attractiveness Index now rates the UK behind the US, China, Germany, Japan and Canada.

“The UK has slipped to sixth place for the first time in more than a year. Policy tinkering and conflicting signals once again become too much for investors and developers to handle”, Ben Warren, EY’s Environmental Finance leader said on the UK’s position in the index said.

The Government has said that subsidies, which have driven the spread of large solar farms across Britain, are to be scrapped under plans to stop the panels blighting the countryside. Energy companies that build solar farms currently qualify for generous consumer-funded subsidies through the so-called ‘Renewable Obligation’ (RO) scheme, and had expected to keep doing so until 2017.

But the Department of Energy and Climate Change announced last month that it planned to shut the RO to new large solar farms two years early, from April next year. Mr Warren said the proposals had “taken the shine off the UK’s otherwise booming solar market”.

The decision follows an admission by ministers that far more projects have been built than expected, leading to a rising subsidy bill for consumers and increasing local opposition. Greg Barker, the energy minister, said in April that solar farms must not become “the new onshore wind” and proposed solar panels installed on factory rooftops instead.

Prime Minister David Cameron wants to go into the next election pledging to “rid” the countryside of onshore wind farms and cut subsidies that would reduce the number of planned wind farms and could encourage developers to start “dismantling” turbines built, in recent years.

A report by the Renewable Energy Foundation has shown that Britain has already approved enough renewable energy projects to hit its EU targets, rendering all 1,000 projects still in the planning system surplus to requirements.

The UK’s 15% target for 2020 covers all energy, including heating and fuels – and in practice is expected to require at least 30% of electricity to come from renewable sources.

“As ever with the renewables sector, more damaging than the outcome of any review itself, is the uncertainty it creates and the trust it erodes. This last quarter has been no exception, with little done to foster sympathy from the renewable energy sector, which appears to be continuously caught in the firing line” Mr Warren said.

“The recent carbon tax freeze, an energy market competition probe and Conservative Party plans to scrap onshore wind subsidies post 2015 are weighing heavily on the sector’s ability to assess the long-term outlook,” he added.

Sitting on the Fence Doesn’t Work…..Your Either In, or You’re Out!

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The same old pledges and platitudes are being rolled out, from Sadiq Khan’s apology in an open letter to UKIP supporters, which then outlines policies designed to entice former Labour voters back to Labour; to David Cameron’s ‘understood and received the message’ soundbite before he went on to proclaim what voters want – with neither party actually asking anyone outside the Westminster bubble why 4.3 million voters put their ‘X’ next to UKIP on the ballot paper

A common thread among the legacy parties is that the EU has to ‘change’.  Having pushed this line for many months, they now use it as a crutch to declare that this is what voters want, and they all declare that if only we vote for them they will bring about the reforms we apparently want.

It is, of course, one huge steaming pile of freshly laid bullshit.

Snake oil isn’t close to the product these people are trying to sell.  Rather they are pushing a product that makes the fictional element ‘Unobtanium’ in the film Avatar, or the dragons storyline in the TV series Game of Thrones look real in comparison.

Whatever ‘reform’ the EU might be persuaded to adopt, it will be trivial and will not result in the return of any powers to the UK that reduce Brussels’ control over the free movement of people, control over the free flow of money to different tax jurisdictions within the bloc, control over the movement of goods and services and the tariffs applied to them.

But despite these facts and despite the legion of Eurocrats, Commissioners and MEPs who have stepped forward to point out these facts and explain that the principles of the EU that underpin it are non-negotiable, our politicians and media continue to talk about EU reform as if it is just a negotiation away – and groups claiming to be Eurosceptic continue to make public demands that renegotation is undertaken.

So it is that a significant proportion of those people who say they want the UK to remain inside the EU do so because they have been fooled into believing reform is possible.

They are being taken in by fantasies and distracted from reality – therefore allowing the politicians to avoid the reality that only invoking Article 50 of the EU Treaty (Lisbon) will result in a renegotiation of the substantive issues and only by leaving the EU will the UK be able to take control of the areas where people want to see change.

We can be in, or we can be out. But we can’t be a bit in between.