Ground-mounted solar heads towards subsidy-free status

Despite a reduction in feed-in tariff rates paid to roof-mounted solar power plants, the market for larger, ground-mounted schemes seems healthy.

Lightsource Renewable Energy connected 23 new ground-mounted sites, totalling more than 100 MW of new capacity, in December last year. This included 14 sites connected under the Feed-in Tariff (FiT) and nine under the Renewable Obligations Certificate (ROC) schemes. The company plans to connect a further 14 ground-mount sites, totalling 92 MW by the end of March – to take its total installed capacity in the UK to 1.3 GW.

Nick Boyle, CEO of Lightsource, explained the company’s approach: ‘Despite the cloud of uncertainty hanging over the industry in recent months, we’ve seen a great many successes in 2015. In response to the recent UK government changes to the solar subsidy mechanism, Lightsource will be installing and connecting its first subsidy-free sites in 2016. The Lightsource private-wire power purchase agreement will see large-scale solar sites ‘hard-wired’ directly into large electricity users – comfortably beating the retail price that they are paying for electricity.’

Meanwhile, Canadian Solar connected an additional five ground-mounted solar power plants, totalling 23 MW, in the last quarter of 2015, bringing its total fleet of solar power plants in operation in the UK to 63 MW.