The United Kingdom has leap-frogged India and Germany to third place in the world ranking for utility-scale solar after a surge in installations in the first quarter of 2015. Developers and contractors pulled out all the stops to finish projects ahead of the 31stMarch deadline, when solar power stations over 5MW became ineligible for the Renewables Obligation incentive mechanism. Almost 1.5GW of installations were completed in the quarter according to data released today by Wiki-Solar.
Leading the surge was Lightsource RE, which now holds some 700MWAC of utility-scale solar capacity, and climbed into the world’s top 10 solar generators in 2014.
Its chief executive Nick Boyle said that “The UK has an extremely competitive ground-mount solar market and we are delighted to be amongst those at the forefront – we installed more than 300MWp in March alone. I still believe there is huge untapped potential.”
The cumulative utility-scale capacity of the world’s top ten countries is shown below:
It will be interesting to see if the UK can hold this position, or whether it will drift back down the table, now the Renewables Obligation (RO) has been restricted and larger systems have to compete in the new Contracts for Difference (CfD) regime.
Nick Boyle’s view is that “the loss of secure tariff for sites larger than 5MW is challenging from a business perspective. Deployment of large-scale solar projects will undoubtedly feel the effects of the CfD regime in its current form. Some changes should be made to the support mechanisms, if solar is to continue on the path to become the cheapest form of electricity generation.”
Wiki-Solar expects growth to slow in the short term as many developers refocus their activities on smaller projects below the utility-scale threshold.
Having said that, we may yet be understating the current figures; when the UK energy regulator catches up with the backlog of station registrations, we may find that even more projects have been connected than are currently shown in our database as having been commissioned.
Editor’s Note: And where is Australia? Wiki-Solar say Australia is still ranked #32 – but should move up to #21 when Nyngan actually comes fully online, expected in June/July.
This article was originally published by Wiki-Solar.org. Reproduced here with permission
