FIT for nothing

Predictably, there’s been a lot of wailing and gnashing of teeth at the minister’s decision to halve the Feed-In Tariff and to impose a jaw-droppingly precipitous deadline (12 Dec).

But really, should we be surprised? I don’t think so. From inception the whole FIT process has been incompetently handled at every level from DECC down. You may recall that FITs were originally launched as “Clean Energy Cashbacks” even though everyone was already calling them FITs. How much taxpayer’s money was wasted on the marketing agency that came up with that stillborn tagline?

The rights and wrongs of the situation will be debated ad nauseam within the industry (such as will remain). For my part, I think the most depressing impact is on confidence: the business community’s in the Government, consumer’s in renewables and their general deployment, entrepreneurs in their attitude to risk given the farcical nature of policy implementation and the impact that will have on their best endeavours to create jobs and wealth (let alone the knockon impact on their families and general wellbeing). Sure, the only certainties are death and taxes but at least let’s have an energy policy that doesn’t gyrate like a secretary of state avoiding a traffic offence.

All that said energy prices will, in our view, continue to rise inexorably. As a consequence ultimately we won’t need feed in tariffs. However it would have been a much wiser decision to allow the infant renewable industry to grow to a position where it was out of nappies before casting it into a world where the very fabric of our civilisation is dependent on the hegemony of fossil fuels.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, November 2nd, 2011 at 11:30 am and is filed under Feed-In Tariff, Politics, Solar PV. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.