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I don’t know about anyone else, but I’m finding it mighty difficult trying to work out whether these are good times or bad times for the renewable energy sector here in the UK.

On the one hand, all the ‘big boys’ (Shell, BP, Scottish and Southern, and so on) have more or less given up and exited the country, and Vestas (the UK’s largest wind manufacturer) sent shockwaves round the markets last week by announcing that it was going to be closing its factory on the Isle of Wight.

On the other hand, the British Wind Energy Association is full of confidence at the prospects for industry (particularly offshore wind), and not just for ‘big wind’. Its latest press release trumpets the conclusions of a new study from America demonstrating major growth in demand for small wind technologies (less than 50 KW). By all accounts, the UK is the world’s biggest exporter of wind turbines in this division, doubling its revenues in 2008 and creating 500 new jobs in the process.

The recent Budget must have strengthened the hand of the renewables optimist, with an additional £500 million for offshore wind to be made available between 2011 and 2014, and £70 million to revive the Low Carbon Buildings Programme and provide new support for community heating schemes.

That particular announcement must also have been very welcome to the UK photovoltaics (PV) industry. Back in March, DECC (the Department of Energy and Climate Change) went temporarily bonkers by axing funding for its solar PV programme – ostensibly on the grounds that it was proving “too popular�, depriving other technologies in the programme of their anticipated share of support.

This is the kind of stop-start idiocy that has characterised the UK’s support for renewables (and PV in particular) going back over many, many years. Some have hypothesized during that time that this is all the proof you need of genuine conspiracy, not cock-up, engineered by a succession of senior civil servants in thrall to the fossil fuel and nuclear lobbies. I, of course, couldn’t possibly comment on such scurrilous hypothesizing, but the intensity and frequency of the cock-ups do rather play into the hands of the conspiracy theorists.

Perhaps that’s now all over? DECC has guaranteed a proper level of ongoing funding for PV, with “no more stop and start�. We’ll see.

In the meantime, if I was an investor, I’d still be very wary. Incoherence in public policy plays straight into scepticism and ambivalence in capital markets. And that’s exactly the problem we still have here in the UK, on both the big stuff and microgeneration.