THE CARBON WAR

Guilt and disruption 247
In the face of reports like this, the Obama administration is reacting.
Just two weeks after its new power sector regulation, it moves to require cuts
in methane leaks.
SunEdison makes a timely announcement about the economics of solar
versus gas, never mind the leaks. One of its solar farms is beating gas on dollars
per unit of electricity in Colorado. This is the first time utility-scale solar PV
resources have come out cost-effective head to head with natural-gas fired
generation.
And so from Black Monday to Grey Thursday. Today the UK government
exceeds the UK solar industry’s worst fears. It announces its intention to slash
solar feed-in-tariff rates by 87%, from January 2016.
Industry leaders describe the move as “alarming”, “damaging” and “absurd”.
“Today’s proposed solar FIT cuts add to the calculated turmoil that the new
Government has unleashed on the solar market since the election”, Solarcentury
CEO Frans van den Heuvel fumes. My e-mail inbox fills with e-mails from
aghast colleagues, in Solarcentury and other companies. “They are trying to
kill us”, says one.
Indeed they are. And the government’s own impact assessment of its
proposed policy assault reveals UK cuts would wipe out 6 gigawatts of solar
by 2020. And doing that they would only save around one percent on average
household energy bills by 2020. It is now completely clear that their assault
on renewables is doctrinaire, driven by desire to eliminate competition for
their collective fixation on shale gas. The only reason they didn’t abandon the
solar feed-in-tariffs completely was presumably to leave a fig leaf of “support”
behind which to obfuscate.
Elsewhere in the press today, a former Shell man who is now trying to
make a career advising on the energy transition, Adrian Kamp, has a thought
on the gas-versus-solar carnage. “Managing a wind farm or solar project is
nothing a good oil and gas man who has built or organised facilities cannot
manage,” he observes.