Downing Street petition urges Cameron to save solar industry
Green policy news - by GreenWise staff
13th December 2011
A 17,000 strong petition and a letter signed by 200 prominent supporters of the solar industry is being handed to Downing Street this lunchtime in a last ditch attempt to get the Prime Minister to protect the solar Feed-in Tariff scheme.
The
petition and the letter are being delivered at 1pm today to Number 10 Downing Street in a bid to get
David Cameron and Deputy Prime Minister
Nick Clegg to intervene in proposals that will see
solar incentives,
in the form of the Government
Feed-in Tariff scheme, cut by more than half. The deep cuts effectively came into force yesterday, but a consultation on the changes is not due to close until December 23.
The letter has been signed by leading environmental figures including Jonathon Porritt and Tony Juniper, as well as directors of the major UK NGOs, including Greenpeace, RSPB and 10:10, and several major unions and academic institutions.
The petition and the letter are being delivered in person to Downing Street by chief executive of the Renewable Energy Association (REA) Gaynor Hartnell, Solar Trade Association (STA) chairman Howard Johns, Friends of the Earth head of Campaigns Andrew Pendleton, Solarcentury chairman Jeremy Leggett, and a group of cross-party MPs.
"We are calling on Cameron and Clegg to intervene to ensure a future for solar power beyond April 1 2012," Hartnell said. "The cost of solar is falling so dramatically that in about five years’ time it should cost no more to generate one’s own solar power than to buy it from an electricity supply company. To get there we need commitment and stability, not boom and bust."
The last-ditch appeal follows the Government’s announced on October 31 that solar schemes up to four kilowatt (kW) in size would be cut to 21 pence per kilowatt hour (p/kWh) from the current 43.3p/kWh. The changes came into force yesterday.
The REA and the STA have warned that the speed and scale of the cuts will cause massive job losses in the solar industry. According to a recent industry survey by the two organisations, job losses in the solar industry could hit 11,000 – 42 per cent of the workforce – and 33 per cent of companies fear they may be forced to close.
The Department of Energy and Climate Change maintains that the scale and speed of the cuts are justified, however, because delaying them would put at risk the entire FiT scheme.
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