Farm renewables support confusion puts projects on hold

Confusion about renewables support is causing many farmers to put wind turbine projects on hold even after obtaining planning consent, warns a major wind turbine company.

A series of government announcements about reducing support and stopping further onshore wind turbine development, has caused much confusion in the farming community, despite there still being support for small-scale wind and other renewables through Feed in Tariffs (Fits).

See also: Farm-based renewables must adapt to tougher future

Kingspan Wind is one of the UK’s biggest suppliers of small scale wind turbines and 90% of its customers are farmers.

Its technical manager Gavin Kerr said he estimated that about 50% of on-farm wind projects had been put on hold as a result of the confusion – and that many had been half way through the planning process of raising capital and gaining planning consent.

“Since the announcement in June we’ve had a mammoth uphill struggle to re-educate the farming sector [about support available],” said Mr Kerr.

The company visits about 50 local and agricultural shows a year around the UK, he said and about 90% of the farmers coming to the stand were “scratching their heads”, thinking that all support for wind turbines had dried up.

The government announced earlier in the year that support for renewables under Contracts for Difference (CoF) and the Renewables Obligation (RO) would be abolished. This affects large-scale wind projects.

It also announced in June that no further onshore wind turbines would be built in England unless they already had planning permission or were in a council-designated wind turbine area.

But support through Fits still exists, including for wind projects and the ban on further onshore wind turbines only applies to England.

However, new standalone solar developments have taken a big hit, as their Fits were cut by 28% from 1 July.

Mark Newton, head of renewables at Fisher German, said there was “no question that the market had cooled” for turbines.

However, he said a knock-on effect of turbine projects drying up was more grid connection availability for other renewable technologies

“Quite good” opportunities still existed for farmers in roof and ground-mounted solar projects, with returns of 10-15% expected, he said.