The Sunday Times was giving the solar industry a big shout this weekend

The Sunday Times was giving the solar industry a big shout this weekend, trumpeting the record amount of PV capacity installed in the year to end March; almost 2GW of capacity was plugged into the grid in this period, which is a serious amount of electricity.

Both articles skate over the rather important point that a large number of solar farms were rushed to installation to beat the new subsidy regime for these large schemes. There will be a lot fewer of them in the immediate future as the government prefers to direct subsidies towards commercial rooftops. Even so, this huge amount of installations coming on stream this year confirms that the industry’s overreaction to the changes in the FiTs paid in 2012 was truly an own goal. As solar PV moves ever closer to becoming self sustaining and truly sustainable, lower subsidies should be celebrated, not whinged about.

You can read them here and here.