DECC have moved £197 million to the FIT budget from ROCs

[GavinA]

Don't get too excited as it's £197 million in total from now til 2015, so isn't even going to cover the existing over spend, but it at least shows they're aware of the budget issues and looking at ways to shuffle some more money about to it.

They don't seem to have made any announcement about it, just tucked it away in a table of a Q & A document they released on the 8th December and placed in the fuel poverty section of their website, which seems a bit bizarre.

This amounts to £14 million extra this year and £35 million next year rising to £89 million by 2019-15. Well, I say extra, as it's extra for FITs, but taken from ROCs, so no overall change for the total renewables spend.

Details here

[Ted]

DECC said this:

The spending limit for the Feed in Tariffs (FITs) scheme as originally published (and set out in the table below) referred to additional expenditure on installations of less than 5MW over and above the baseline of installations that would have happened anyway (because some installations would have come forward under the Renewables Obligation (RO)). We have now incorporated that baseline into the spending limit for FITs so that it is clear what the total spending limit is for FITs and the RO. This technical adjustment to the published spending limits merely provides a more accurate picture of the money that was always available for installations above 5MW and for installations below 5 MW. We have not made more subsidy available for FITs or less for the RO.

There is no way that that amount of money would have been paid out by ROCs (at 9p/kWh) to sub-5MW systems if FiTs had not been started.

If that was all allocated to PV systems then it would have required an extra 183MW of new installations just in the current year and, as we had less than 8.25MW of PV (15MW for all system types) registered for ROCs before FiTs started, this seems impossibly unlikely at an incentive that would have been less than 25% of the FiTs payments.