And there’s a reason why some energy industry watchers expect the green power sector to accelerate.

Office of National Statistics (ONS) figures from August 2016 showed that between 1998 and 2015 the percentage of energy originating from renewable and waste sources rose from 1% to 9% of total UK energy consumption.

This boom in renewables comes against a backdrop of various renewables subsidy cuts by the government over the last two years, raising the prospect of subsidy-free projects leading the charge into the future. 

Analysis of the government’s infrastructure plans by the Green Alliance – published at the end of 2016 – found that renewables spending was set to decline by 95% up to 2020.

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The same report found that renewables spending had already fallen by £1.1bn in just the last six months of 2016 due to a “shrinking pipelines of projects”. 

The government has claimed that the reason for many of its cuts was that subsidies were forcing energy bills to increase. In its January 2017 ‘Building Our Industrial Strategy’ green paper, it stated that: “Subsidies and other forms of state support have played an important role in creating markets for new technologies and driving down their costs. But it is important that we move steadily to an operating model in which competitive markets deliver the energy on which our country depends.”

And yet the renewables industry is growing. On 7th June 2017, the National Grid tweeted that: “For the first time ever this lunchtime wind, nuclear and solar were all generating more than both gas and coal combined."

A primary reason for this is the global trend towards solar and self-funding wind farms, which has been made possible by dramatic cost reductions and technological improvements, reducing dependence on conventional subsidies. As a result, Bloomberg New Energy Finance has predicted that such energy will be cheaper than coal-fired generation in many countries within five years, and will provide a third of the world’s electricity in about 25 years.

Despite this boom, however, fossil fuels still account for 80% of the world’s energy and scepticism still abounds. As a consequence, the claims frequency on renewables transactions is higher.

The industry as a whole has come to accept that title insurance is critical to de-risking projects because an inadequate title makes the site more vulnerable to attack.

The renewables industry is awash with creative and innovative developers, project managers and technical support personnel who will always find a way of thinking laterally through the obstacles in their path.

Insurers too will need to continue innovating to mirror a highly innovative sector, with the next challenge being to find ways of delivering projects that allow for greater ease of risk management.

In the past four years, Titlesolv has dealt with a range of claims from challenges to access to parties claiming turbary rights, as well as challenges to planning permissions.

In addition, our policies are also often used to provide wrappers around titles of portfolios that are in the process of changing hands in the secondary markets.

Titlesolv is the trading name of London & European Title Insurance Services Ltd authorised and regulated by the Financial Conduct Authority.