The UK’s Department of Energy and Climate Change (DECC) has released the official quarterly statistics for solar installations in 2012. Under the newly-introduced capacity trigger mechanism, the level of installations recorded in May, June and July inform the feed-in tariff (FiT) rates for November 1.

As a result, the FiT rates in the UK from November 1 will be as follows:

The announcement of the upcoming FiT rate digression for those installations that lie between 0-50kW follows disappointing installation figures as a result of the introduction of a lower FiT rate in August.

The installation rate dropped by 87% following the slashing of the domestic FiT rate from £0.21/kWh down to £0.16/kWh. When the new £0.1544/kWh rate is introduced in November, it will complete a 65% decrease in the available FiT rate over the last six months.

Despite the swingeing cuts to the available feed-in tariff rates, the UK market is still continuing to perform strongly – installing 260MW in Q3’12.

Large-scale solar installations are also experiencing a significant renaissance in the UK under the Renewable Obligation (RO) scheme, which supports installations >5MW. The UK government recently announced that it would keep its level of support for large-scale solar at 2ROCs until April 2013, whilst it consults further over future support for solar technology.