HC 1605 Energy and Climate Change and Environmental Audit CommitteesWritten evidence submitted by Nick Pascoe
1.1 The Impact assessment released yesterday has some interesting information,
DECC estimate that installations will reduce by 95% as a result of the proposal (or putting it more bluntly, 95% * 25,000 jobs to be lost).
That the current cost of FiTs to bill payers is just £1.40 per year.
In the “do nothing scenario” (just drop Fits 9% each April) that the addition to your electricity bill would reach £25.80/yr by 2020 (but no one is arguing for this unsustainable scenario).
No account is taken in the IA of the loss to the Revenue of 25,000*95% lots of PAYE or consequential state support costs of those redundancies.
No account is taken of the electricity savings made by the 100,000 “hard working families” that have had PV installed and how many now will miss out on similar opportunity to reduce their energy bills- particularly the poorest in society where the take of the “free solar” option has proven a fantastic way to reduce fuel poverty.
1.2 The impact assessment shows the [partial] impact of widely differing proposals for the future of the FiT. For me, there seems to be missing a scenario, a middle ground position that the Solar Industry has long been calling for. One in which the FiT is cut 35% by end Dec; hard swift but palatable. This should have been modeled to see how many fewer jobs would be lost and how the Solar PV sector could have ended up as being sustainable rather than demolished. The fact that only the highest case and the devastating current case were modeled points to some of the purposeful intent behind destroying the UK’s Solar industry.
1.3 Right from the moment that Treasury / DECC were persuaded by the big6 Energy companies to put a CAP on the FiT, it was doomed. The mass roll out of Solar PV has grown to become a threat to the established order of the big power generation monopolies in other EU countries. The big six, behind 99% of all UK electricity, do not want it here. They asked the Govt. to squash it and supported that with prolonged non-fact based rhetoric about green taxes pushing up energy prices. Did you know the Big6 have a seat on the board of the Renewable Energy Association
1.4 The reality is that DECC are Nuclear focused. Post Fukushima Nuclear is too expensive for EDF / RWE to make the returns they’re seeking. They’re dawdling whilst ministers are ever more desperate to please them so that they’ll get on and build the nukes. We’ll see many more nuclear and gas power generation supportive policies coming through in coming months / years whilst any realistic threat to that dominance is purposefully contained by Govt. Policy.
3 November 2011