The FIT scheme, introduced in 2010, provides financial incentives to individuals, businesses, and organisations generating electricity from renewable sources.
December 15, 2025
The latest quarterly report from Ofgem covering the second quarter of FIT Year 16 (July 1 to September 30, 2025) reveals continued activity under the Feed-In Tariffs (FIT) scheme, despite its closure to new applicants in 2019.
During this period, six new installations were registered, contributing 0.059MW of Total Installed Capacity (TIC). This brings the cumulative totals under the scheme to 869,620 installations and 6,492MW of TIC.
Of the installations accredited this quarter, five were solar photovoltaic (PV) and one was hydroelectric. In terms of capacity, this saw solar PV account for 73.2% of the quarter’s new TIC, and hydroelectric contributed 26.8%.
This quarter’s figures represent a slight decline compared to the previous quarter, which saw eight new registrations and 0.068 MW of TIC accredited.
The FIT scheme, introduced in 2010, provides financial incentives to individuals, businesses, and organisations generating electricity from renewable sources.
This is available for installations of solar panels, wind turbines, hydroelectric systems, anaerobic digestion and micro-combined heat and power (Micro-CHP).
Although the scheme closed to new applicants on March 31, 2019, installations registered before the deadline continue to receive payments for the duration of their agreed terms, which range from 10 to 25 years depending on the technology.
The costs and benefits of adding renewable energy to buildings
As of the end of Scheme Year 15 (April 2024 to March 2025), for which Ofgem also published figures, the FIT scheme had reached 869,659 active accreditations, of which 98.93% were solar PV installations. Indeed, solar accounted for 79.31% (5.15GW) of total installed capacity. Most of these installations, 99.56%, were what Ofgem considers microgenerators (capacity below 50kW), primarily domestic rooftop systems.
In Scheme Year 15, an estimated 3% of households in Great Britain had solar PV installations supported by the FIT scheme.
Over that period, 8.0TWh of renewable electricity was generated under the scheme. Of this, 1.5TWh (18.8%) was exported to the grid, with associated export payments totalling £94 million. FIT generators received a total of £1.73 billion in payments for generation and export.
When it was first introduced, the FIT scheme saw such a boom that in 2015 the government unveiled sweeping – and at the time exceptionally unpopular – changes that saw a cap introduced to limit how much solar could be installed as well as a proposed reduction from 12.47p/kWh to 1.63p/kWh that was later upped to 4.39p/kWh following industry protests.
UK’s first zero-bills microgrid powers largest Octopus Energy community
When it was scrapped in 2019, the Labour Party’s then-shadow energy minister Rebecca Long Bailey described it as “pushing an already struggling solar industry off a cliff edge”.
Smart Export Guarantee (SEG) payments were introduced in January 2020 to replace the FIT scheme, with a key difference being that the payment rate would be set by energy suppliers, resulting in a wide spread of prices. This has seen Octopus Energy, for example, strive to offer competitive export tariff rates, claiming to pay customers who export electricity more than any other UK energy supplier.
Read more about:
Molly Green
Senior Reporter, Informa
Molly joined the team in 2024 and has led coverage on the UK sites. Now shifting to a more global view, Molly is interested in how legislation shapes market dynamics, covering the intersection of policy design, investment patterns, and energy transition pathways.
You May Also Like
Featured Event
25 November – 26 November 2025 / Warsaw, Poland Large Scale Solar Central and Eastern Europe continues to be the place to leverage a network that has been made over more than 10 years, to build critical partnerships to develop solar projects throughout the region.
Copyright © 2025 All rights reserved. Informa Markets, a trading division of Informa PLC.
