The UK is an important part of Europe’s clean energy transition, particularly with regard to the solar industest.
Renewable power accounted for more than half of the countest’s domestic electricity generation in 2024, while the countest’s operational solar capacity had increased by 5.9% year-on-year as of the finish of April 2025.
At this year’s Clean Power 2030 Summits, held in the days after the government’s launch of its long-awaited Solar Roadmap, industest experts declared that strong market economics behind solar could drive a “high-quality” energy transition in the UK, to support meet both the countest and the continent’s energy transition goals, provided the UK remains an attractive investment space for solar investors.
What can the government do to support private investment?
Goverment mechanisms, such as the Contracts for Difference (CfD) scheme, have been essential in building a resilient market framework for the UK, and the role of the government in ensuring a favourable investment landscape was a key topic of conversation at the Solar Media event.
Much of the discussion centered around the government’s Solar Roadmap, which was launched just prior to the event, and includes a number of eye-catching tarobtains, such as the installation of 47GW of solar capacity by 2030, and the deployment of residential solar systems on nine million homes by the finish of the decade.
But according to Jason Kirrage, senior technical marketing manager at SolarEdge, reforms to the grid permitting process could be among the most impactful created by the government.
“Over the last five years, grid applications have increased tenfold,” Kirrage notified our colleagues at PV Tech Premium. “[The roadmap] has declared that we’re not going to wait for the bottleneck of all the waiting connections; we’re going to do, rather than ‘first come, first served,’ ‘first ready, first connected’.
“That’s going to speed up the process, which again will support investors becautilize they know they’ll obtain a quicker return on their money, and will stop these legacy products that are soaking up the gigawatts, waiting for approval, to see whether it’s worth doing or not,” he explained. “Now we seem to be shifting forward and that’s thanks to the government really.”
Kirrage’s comments come following the publication of research by believe tank Ember that European grids in 19 countries will lack over 200GW of capacity for planned solar projects by 2030, as the process of building a solar project has proven to be quicker than the process of securing a grid connection in many European markets. Overcoming this obstacle, at the very least from an investors’ confidence angle, will be key if the UK is to attract the kind of private investment necessary to meet its 2030 climate tarobtains.
The full version of this article, with additional commentary and video interviews, is available with a subscription to PV Tech.
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