Mark Latham, Deputy Business Editor
Scotland’s wind energy sector has hit out at last week’s UK government
tariff review for small scale energy generators saying that that a newly
imposed cap on the number of wind turbines that will qualify for Feed-in
Tariff (FiT) subsidies could restrict the building of new wind turbines to
as few as one a month across the UK.
Trade body Scottish Renewables says that, although the new reduced rates
for small wind turbines are not too bad, a new quarterly deployment cap
hidden away in the 115-page document could lead to the “ridiculous”
situation that, dependent on the size of the turbine, just one turbine a
month could be built.
Senior Policy Manager at Scottish Renewables Joss Blamire told the Sunday
Herald: “While the UK government listened to the industry in relation to
FiT rate cuts for solar, the devil is very much in the detail for onshore
wind.
“Caps imposed on turbines between 50kW and 100kW mean only one machine a
month will be supported across the whole UK.
“With at least a dozen companies producing and installing turbines at this
scale, these caps clearly do not provide room for the continued development
of their projects, many of which would have been owned by local communities
and rural businesses.”
Steve Macken, the owner of Lomond Energy near Dumbarton said, that while
the new tariffs were “challenging but workable” a deployment cap of 6.8
megawatts of installed capacity in the first quarter of next year (set to
fall to 5.7MW by 2019) for 100kW to 1.5MW turbines was the equivalent of
just four 1.5MW turbines and a handful of smaller turbines across the UK.
“This shows a serious lack of ambition on behalf of the UK government,” he
said. “The effect of this will be pretty savage and will lead to a severe
shrinking of the sector.
“We are a small rural based company with three employees and have had to
make one employee redundant as a result of putting our development pipeline
on hold.”
Mark Jones, the chief executive of Netherlands-based EWT, a company that
makes small to medium sized turbines, said that his company would likely
have to move its focus away from the UK as a result of the new regime.
Over the last year the company has built and supplied over 100 wind
turbines for the UK market, many of them installed in Scotland. But this
level of work would likely collapse because of the cuts, he said.
Under the Department of Energy and Climate Change’s new plans, FiTs for
onshore wind turbines will fall by as much as 65 per cent from February.
Annual new spending for the FiTs across all technologies will be capped at
£100m up to April 2019.
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