The UK Government on Tuesday finally proposed what amounts to relatively mediocre guidelines intended to support the development of small-scale renewable energy technologies by ensuring remuneration for any and all electricity generated that is supplied to the grid by small-scale generators. The proposed Smart Export Guarantee was unveiled by the UK’s Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy (BEIS) and opened for consultation until early March, and comes less than a month after all hell broke loose when the BEIS announced in December that existing schemes to incentivize small-scale generators to supply electricity to the grid were closing, and that no replacement was intended. Such schemes — a Feed-in Tariff (FiT) scheme and a generator export tariff — remunerated small-scale generators for the electricity they generated but then supplied to the grid, according to cleantechnica.com.

Both are set to close on 31 March, and in December the BEIS made it clear there were no plans to replace them, leaving new small-scale generators in the lurch.

Those most obviously affected by such a shift are rooftop solar owners, but the UK boasts approximately 560,000 households and businesses generating small-scale electricity under the FiT scheme using a range of technologies including anaerobic digestion (generating energy from waste products), wind power, biomass, and hydro-electricity. However, these technologies are in the overwhelming minority, with 99% of small-scale generators under the FiT using rooftop solar.

This 99% accounts for 80% of the capacity being generated by these small-scale generators, with wind accounting for 12%, hydro for 3%, and anaerobic digestion for 5%.The BEIS announced, however, a proposed Smart Export Guarantee for small-scale renewable electricity generators which would guarantee payment for excess electricity supplied to the grid. The proposed Guarantee would specifically replace the FiT scheme and would require electricity suppliers to pay new small-scale energy producers for excess electricity generated from homes and businesses which is supplied to the grid.