The House of Commons adjourned on 24 July. For some, the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy’s contribution to the end of term bin round was secretary of state Greg Clark’s announcement that Cuadrilla had finally won permission for its plans to carry out test fracking for gas on a site outside Preston, Lancashire.
It capped a miserable few days for clean energy champions, who had been downcast since the previous week’s publication of a consultation paper spelling out curtains for small-scale renewable projects when the feed-in tariff (FIT) regime ends next March
Unlike the fracking announcement, the FIT subsidy axe wasn’t even presented to parliament, even though the mechanism has underpinned the dramatic expansion of solar provision that the generation system has been benefiting from handsomely during the recent hot weather.
The latest BEIS energy digest, published last week, set new records for the share of electricity generation powered by renewable energy. However the current investment pipeline gives little grounds for confidence that these improvements can be maintained.