Ahead of next year’s Solar Finance & Investment Europe event, hosted in London by Solar energy portal publisher Solar Media, speaker Guy Lavarack, chief investment officer at Luminous Energy Group, tells us about how the maturity of the UK solar and storage market has influenced the risk assessment for investors in the sector.
“The UK market has matured, the technologies have matured and one of the biggest risks right now is around execution and just the capacity in the market to build,” says Lavarack.
His comments come as part of a broader discussion on risk assessment and mitigation in the European solar sectorand follow years of activity in the UK solar space for the company. Luminous Energy developed and sold the 9.2 MW Paddock Wood solar farm in 2015, and Lavarack notes that the maturity of the UK market and the resulting increase in average project size have increased existing risk types such as interface and grid risks.
“Within implementation it has always been there, but the management of interface risks [and] Managing the electricity grid is an important risk when carrying out projects. As projects have grown in scale and scale and numbers have increased accordingly, it has become increasingly important to manage accordingly, especially around the electricity grid and the capacity of Distribution Network Operators (DNOs) to execute,” he explains.
Lavarack further notes that these risks are not unique to Britain, pointing to a loss of “talent that is not easily replaced” across Europe among DNOs following the Covid-19 pandemic.
Many of these risks are promoted by the increasing interest in the co-location of battery energy storage systems (BESS) and renewable energy generation projects in Europe; Figures from Wood Mackenzie show that European battery storage deployment is expected to grow by 45% year-on-year by the end of 2025. While battery installations are an effective means of limiting variance in renewable energy generation and helping renewable projects deliver electricity in a manner closer to baseload generation, the addition of a separate technology increases complexity and capital investment for project developers.
Read the full interview here on our sister site PV Tech.
Lavarack will speak on the first day of the 13th edition of the Solar financing and investments Europe event in London on February 3 – 4, 2026, organized by PV technology publisher Solar Media. This event annually attracts infrastructure funds, institutional investors, asset managers, banks and development platforms that are at the forefront of European renewable energy sources. For more details, visit the website.
