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Energy: Feed-in Tariffs

My Lords, with the leave of the House, I shall now repeat as a Statement an Urgent Question made in the other place by my honourable friend the Minister of State for Climate Change. ““Since the feed-in tariffs scheme started it has been successful in encouraging people up and down the country to get involved in local, clean, green energy generation. Solar PV has led the way and over 100,000 homes now generate their own electricity. But let us be clear: the current returns now available on solar PV investments, funded by consumers through their energy bills, are unsustainable. Falling PV costs mean returns are double those originally envisaged under the scheme. This does not provide value for money for the consumer. If we do not act now, the entire £877 million FITs budget for the current spending review period will be fully committed within the next few months. That would limit the number of people able to benefit from feed-in tariffs in general. We are therefore urgently consulting on new tariffs for solar PV installations. Because of the urgency, we propose that these new tariffs apply to all new installations that become eligible for FITs on or after a reference date, which we propose should be 12 December. We are also seeking views on other proposals, including one to strengthen the link between feed-in tariffs and energy efficiency. It cannot be right, and it is a fault of the system we inherited, that we currently subsidise renewable energy generation for inefficient buildings. We are determined to secure successful feed-in tariffs through sustainable growth rather than through boom and bust. That is why we are consulting today on new tariffs for solar PV: to save the FITs budget in the interests of all eligible technologies and to bring much greater coherence to this Government’s ambitious policy to green Britain’s homes””.