Early signs of a rebalancing of the renewables market
The Microgeneration Certification Scheme (MCS) November newsletter was recently released, and a graph caught the eye of the
solarblogger. It is reproduced below.
The total number of MCS registered installers has been
falling for some time. Companies
registered to install photovoltaic (PV) solar technologies dominate the
numbers, and since the painful tariff adjustments of 2011, the number of
registered companies has been steadily falling.
In the last 12 months the number of solar PV installers has fallen from around 4,300 to around 3,000.
Two features of the scheme may mean that even these figures
are an over-statement of the number of active PV installation businesses.
First, since businesses renew annually with the scheme, a
company decision to exit a market can take some time to feed through into the
figures. Falling registration figures
will trail by an average of six months.
Second, renewal is significantly less expensive than a new
registration with the scheme. This
asymmetry causes business to retain their MCS registration even when they are
not actively working in the market “just in case things pick up.”
Industry colleagues estimate that around 10-25% of MCS
registered PV installers are not actively selling solar PV.
But none of this is news.
The thing that really jumped off the page for the
solarblogger was that while the registered PV installer numbers have continued to fall, the
total has actually risen since August
2013.
There has been an increase in the number of businesses
registering to install heating technologies such as biomass, heat pumps and
solar thermal.
Details of the domestic Renewable Heat Incentive (RHI) were announced in July 2013. This scheme pays
households that install heat-generating renewable technology and will go some
way towards rebalancing the UK government’s lopsided support for renewables. A successful domestic RHI alongside a stable
Feed in Tariff could deliver long term growth for both renewable heat and
electricity.
It seems like industry might just be starting to believe in the
RHI.
