We got our CfD ... oh dear.

The good news - we got a CfD for Wick Farm! One of only five solar projects that made it through.

The bad news - the strike price is £50.00/MWh! Which is roughly what we could sell the electricity for in the open market, so there's no subsidy attached. However, if we don't accept the offer, we're in for the non-delivery obligation. So we got the stick without the carrot, the hook without the bait.

We just chose the wrong delivery year. If we'd put the project on ice for a year we'd have got the highly marginal CfD rate of £79.23, where maybe we could have built the project if we'd knocked enough heads together.

For solar, this CfD round doesn't look much like "world-leading competitive auction", it looks a lot like policy failure. Lumping together a mixture of grid-stranded small projects that had fallen (or had been ejected) from the ROC framework and making them bid for a single funding pot means than no projects over 5MW get built in the next year, and maybe three get built the year after.

The Solar Trade Association will no doubt welcome this as another great leap towards subsidy-free solar. Wick Farm just got there a couple of years before anyone else!