Sun sets on the solar-powered revolution

Geoffrey Lean is afraid to say that the solar-powered chickens may be fluttering home to roost.

By Geoffrey LeanPublished: 6:09PM BST 16 Oct 2009
Over long years I have developed a rule of thumb on the launching of government initiatives: the bigger the fanfare, the glitzier the setting, and the greater the array of ministers in attendance, the more insubstantial it will turn out to be. For British officialdom has mastered an art that eluded Mark Antony – burying something while praising it.
At first, this summer’s launch of the Government’s much-trumpeted plans for a green industrial revolution – 650 ponderous pages of documents, including a renewable energy White Paper – seemed to avoid these perils. The press conference was in a dingy basement in Lord Mandelson’s Business Department – and though a batch of ministers, headed by the power-soaked peer himself, were duly on display, they fell short of truly ominous numbers.

But then followed a self-congratulatory ministerial bash in the Science Museum – not quite in the same league as the City’s Guildhall and Whitehall’s Banqueting House, ornate portals to oblivion both – but worrying. I was not invited, but turned up anyway, to sense a whiff of doom. I wrote at the time of my doubts of whether the revolution was for real. And now it seems, in at least one important respect – enabling families to become more self-sufficient in energy – the solar-powered chickens may be fluttering home to roost.
It’s a shame. For if households can properly insulate their homes and install small-scale renewable technologies – such as solar panels – they become independent of energy companies, and turn a tidy profit by selling electricity back to the grid. This can reduce the need for large generating stations – whether powered by fossil fuels, the atom, or the wind – and simultaneously cut Britain’s carbon emissions. David Cameron’s Conservatives have grasped the concept’s importance. But it is hated by officials, who loathe the idea of millions of people making decisions instead of them. They have diligently reined it back, by slashing grants, whenever it looked like taking off. And despite last summer’s fanfare, this seems to be happening again.
There’s huge potential for generating energy at home. A report backed by Lord Mandelson’s department last year concluded that under a “plausible policy scenario” nine million dwellings – about one in three in Britain – could be exploiting such “micropower” by 2020, producing as much energy as five large nuclear power stations. A less expensive programme could equip three million homes.
Instead – under plans on which public consultation ended on Thursday – the Government is aiming at a modest 870,000, producing just two per cent of Britain’s power, one sixteenth of the technical potential. Solar electricity, the most promising of all the technologies, is planned to provide only half a percentage point – even, as David Cameron pointed out yesterday, though similarly cloudy Germany last year installed about 250 times as many panels.
Hopes were high of a rooftop renewable revolution this year after the Government finally agreed (or rather was forced to do so by a Tory resolution in the House of Lords) to introduce “feed-in tariffs”, the secret of Germany’s success. But the consultation documents show that rates for generating renewable power have been fixed at a level apparently designed to stop it succeeding. The European Photovoltaic Industry Association says that the tariffs should provide an 8-12 per cent annual return on investment for sustainable micropower growth. India has just launched a scheme with a 19 per cent return. But the Government’s plans provide for just 5-8 per cent.
Again, solar electricity seems to be being particularly discouraged, at 4 per cent. The official Energy Savings Trust estimates it will take some 15 years to recoup the capital cost – and families on average live in a home for just seven. Ministers say that micropower took off in Germany at similar tariffs: but there it was part of a package that offered householders low-interest loans for the whole capital cost. The Government has ruled out similar help here.
Loans have been promised for energy-saving measures – to be paid back out of savings on energy bills – but again ministers are dragging their feet. They accept that the loans must be attached to the home, so that succeeding owners continue repaying out of their savings. But this would require legislation, which they have no plans to introduce. Instead they are setting up four pilot projects, which will not report until 2011 and, without the law change, will not be true trials. Which all suggests that the Science Museum was the wrong place for the launch. Ministers should have gone next door, to the Natural History Museum, to celebrate under the long dead bones of the dinosaur.