EU Levy Puts Projects At Risk

The industry is waiting with baited breath to see the official outcome of the European Commission's investigation into anti-dumping accusations against Chinese manufacturers. Orta Solar is one company who believes that the outcome of punitive tariffs will force them to reconsider about £180M worth of projects

Orta Solar is a southern England based team, that have developed one of the UK's largest solar farm portfolios to date. The company has had to recently announce to investors, that it is being forced to consider postponing over £180 million of UK construction projects in reaction to an EU trade levy of between 40% and 70% proposed to be added to the import price of Chinese solar products. 

"We're tremendously disappointed to hear this proposed news", declared Nick Pascoe, the business's Managing Director. "We invest many millions in surveying, planning, legal, financial and technical design work typically twelve months prior to constructing these projects and we no longer know whether it will be economically viable to construct UK commercial scale solar farms later in 2013 and beyond. How can we possibly continue to invest?".

Orta's team members have successfully planned for well over 20 solar farms at a construction cost of £250 million creating enough CO2 free electricity to power 37,500 British homes and creating hundreds of UK professional and construction jobs. Building on this background, work on Orta's next round of projects due for commissioning before the end of March 2014 is presently going ahead in full swing. 

"We're astonished that the EU has bought into the protectionist argument of 42 largely bankrupt EU based solar wafer & cell manufacturers at the expense of thousands of EU based solar development and installation businesses who depend on easy availability of low cost solar panels for their existence. Any certainty we had on future construction costs has just been removed with the stroke of a pen. We're writing to and speaking with all of our clients, suppliers and partners explaining the impact of the proposed EU levy, suggesting how they can help by lobbying the UK's Dept. of Energy & Climate Change and explaining what we're doing to help keep their projects on track. I'm an advocate of EU harmonisation to bring down trade barriers.