Preliminary accreditation

A preliminary accreditation process was introduced to give early notice of, and some protection against, contingent degression

Warning! The government proposes to remove pre-accreditation – see here.

Tariff reduction timing and preliminary accreditation

The contingent element of degression provides for adjustments based on the level of deployment. This means that investors can’t be absolutely sure when tariff rates will go down.

To hedge against this, eligible systems which are registered using the ROO-FIT process (ie solar and wind over 50kW and all hydro and AD projects), and community projects, are eligible for preliminary accreditation before they are actually built.

Once a project has achieved preliminary accreditation, it will then in most cases attract the tariff applicable at that time, subject to the conditions below.

All preliminary accredited installations will be included within the capacity deployed for the purposes of calculating capacity triggers.

Community energy projects

Similar benefits in terms of crystallising a defined tariff level are extended to ‘community energy projects‘ even if they are below the size requirements given above. These can fix the tariff level for a year after providing a letter of intent and EPC (engineering, procurement and construction) contract.

Preliminary accreditation conditions

Some pre-requisites have been applied to minimise the tendency for projects to achieve preliminary accreditation and then not get built, as this would distort the deployment figures (and therefore contingent degression triggers).

To gain the benefit of the pre-defined tariff level, the eventual installation must be of the type and size that was pre-accredited and must be commissioned within a reasonable period of the preliminary accreditation date:

Allowable period from preliminary accreditation (or community project contract) to commissioning