The Department of Energy and Climate Change has claimed that 98MW of solar capacity was added in May and revised upwards its Q1 deployment estimate.
DECC’s monthly statistical release showed the surprising deployment for May 2016, which is nearly twice the 57MW which is recorded as deployed in May last year.
That deployment comes at a time when domestic install figures have fallen substantially. The department’s figures show around 15MW of that monthly deployment to have been carried out under MCS-accredited schemes.
The remaining 83MW of May’s deployment figures have been placed by DECC in the >25MW size category. This would be of considerable surprise due to the fact that the 1.3 ROC grace period – the only subsidy scheme available to support a solar farm of that size – closed on 31 March.
Meanwhile the department has also revised its Q1 2016 deployment estimate, including the 1.3 ROC build-out period, upwards to 808MW.
While this is a considerable increase on the 370MW DECC originally forecast in April, it is still nearly half the 1.553GW figure Solar Intelligence has estimated for the same period.
This morning Finlay Colville, head of market intelligence at Solar Media, writes on the subject of the UK’s solar register lag.
The department has also released details relating to the UK’s renewable energy generation and consumption as per the European Union’s Renewable Energy Directive, which confirm a significant increase in solar generation for 2015.
Over the course of the calendar year a total of 7.6TWh of solar power was produced in the UK – an increase of around 87% - taking PV’s share of total renewable generation to 9%.
That marked increase helped the UK increase renewables’ share of total electricity generation to 22.3%, up 4.5 percentage points year-on-year, however the same could not be said for the country’s progress in heat and transport.
Renewable heat production recorded a modest increase of 0.8 percentage points in 2014, however the renewables share of transport consumption actually fell by nearly 1 percentage point to 4.1% of total transport energy.
That decline will illustrate the work ahead needed by DECC, particularly given that it has today agreed with the Committee on Climate Change’s fifth carbon budget.