The statutory consultation the Government undertook, the responses and subsequent changes
Consultations on reviews of the tariffs
Each review of the tariffs is typically subject to one or more consultations, as described in this section.
Initial Government consultation
The Government issued its document describing the proposed design of the Feed-In Tariffs on 15th July 2009 alongside many other policy documents about renewable energy and climate change. The details can be dowloaded as pdfs on the Department of Energy and Climate Change’s web page on Closed Consultation.
For reasons that make sense to the civil servants (but might not to you and me), the same consultation covers not only the FITs but also other financial incentives, and in particular the Renewable Obligation. The parts relevant to the tariffs are on pages 61 to 93.
The Government also published other documents alongside this consultation, including the required regulatory impact assessment. Those documents are also available on the DECC website.
Critique of the Government’s proposals
The Government got it more right than wrong and its proposals mirror in many ways the blueprint they received from the industry.
However there were several issues that we believed should be changed. The main issues were:
- The tariff levels were set on the low side
- Some types of renewables would have got a lower return than others
- Existing systems installed before 15th July 2009 were not eligible
- Some types of renewables had been omitted
- It was not clear if the tariffs are index-linked
There were some other more specialised problems highlighted in our response and in the the full response from our associated company.
Consultation responses
In addition to our own response, we provided guidance for people on how to submit their own responses. Many thanks to all those who responded to the Government consultation.
A summary of all the responses put to the Government is given here.
Government response to the responses
The Government subsequently took these responses into consideration in producing the final design of the scheme.
As you can see they addressed our first second and fifth bullet point above. Points three and four weren’t resolved.