There’s a dreadful sense of inevitability about the chaos surrounding the current status of Feed-in-Tariffs for PV.

Two weeks ago, Ministers in DECC announced that they would be reviewing all schemes of 50 kW and upwards – presumably with a view to changing the thresholds or restricting the tariff payments.

In short order, anyone with an interest in PV-based enterprises above 50kW curled up in a foetal ball and started screaming.Investors with an interest in specific PV projects launched into tirades of the foulest invective, confining all pig-ignorant, poxy politicians to outer hell.Community groups emailed in a bemused way about what had happened, before clustering in the pub to drink themselves into a near-suicidal stupor.

Meanwhile, Treasury officials sloped off home content in the knowledge that they had carried out another spectacularly effective spoiling operation to screw the prospects for solar power in the UK yet again.

I’m not being paranoid.For those who don’t know this particular part of the UK’s deplorable record on renewable energy, it bears briefly retelling.

As a wide range of EU countries, led by Germany, moved over the last decade towards the use of Feed-in-Tariffs as their principal market mechanism for promoting renewable energy, Treasury and DTI (as it then was) remained aloof.Eventually, coming under increasing pressure, they carried out some crude analysis of how Feed-in-Tariffs were working elsewhere, and decided it was going to be too expensive for the UK (especially for PV), and that we were doing just fine with the Renewables Obligation as our own (unique) policy instrument.

We were then (and still are) third from the bottom of the EU league table for renewable energy.Just fine.

From that point on, Treasury officials have remained implacably hostile to the idea of PV supported by Feed-in-Tariffs – with little more than the odd whimper of dissent from officials in Defra and BIS.

They’ve rubbished academic research demonstrating the value of pump-priming PV businesses to establish robust supply chains.They’ve vilified the industry as ineffective and self-interested.They did everything they could to marginalise both NGOs (as the campaign built) and MPs (as a strong, pro-FiTs coalition in the House of Commons came together), and gulled one Energy Minister after another into believing that there was no case for introducing FiTs in the UK.And never would be.

In 2008, Gordon Brown appointed Ed Miliband as Secretary of State in the brand new Department of Energy and Climate Change.Miliband asked his officials (transferred over from BIS and Defra) to explain to him how it was that we were doing so badly on renewables relative to other EU countries.Could it have anything to do with our refusal to have anything to do with Feed-in-Tariffs?

“Absolutely not”, they instantly asserted.But it quickly became apparent to Ed Miliband that changing the Department’s name hadn’t changed their mindsets one little bit – and they were still just as much in thrall to Treasury as they’d always been.

One of the reasons I’ve always liked Ed Miliband is that he then did his own homework, came to a very different conclusion from his officials, and told them – and their puppet-masters in Treasury – to get stuffed.A couple of days later (before Treasury could re-group), he announced that he’d be introducing Feed-in-Tariffs after a brief period of further consultation.And so he did, with the overall scheme kicking in in April last year.

But Treasury never gives up.They know Secretaries of State come and go.And they knew that the Labour Government was on the way out.So they simply resumed battle with the new Coalition Government – a battle made slightly more complicated by having to deal with a senior Lib Dem (Chris Huhne) as the new Secretary of State in DECC.

Their first opportunity came with the Comprehensive Spending Review last year, and although they failed to get the FiTs scheme scrapped altogether, they secured the right to impose an overall cap in the amount of money available, and forced Chris Huhne to agree to a review earlier than 2012 in the event of the scheme turning out to be “too successful”.

A few weeks after that, Treasury began to get wind of plans from solar developers keen to do stand-alone field arrays - or “solar farms”.Cornwall has now given planning permission for four such schemes, and there’s interest in several other counties.Even though the combined scale of these projects is still small, officials in DECC apparently hadn’t foreseen the possible level of interest – although as far as I’m concerned, they’re just as good a way of doing PV as any other.

But that was all Treasury needed to mount another attack on PV in general, and on the levels of support for PV through Feed-in-Tariffs.The “threat” (even Chris Huhne is now using that terminology, which shows how well he’s been brainwashed by Treasury thinking) of ground-mounted solar PV was apparently so serious as to require an immediate review of any scheme of more than 50 kW – which, of course, includes not just the very small number of solar farms, but a much wider range of schemes planned for schools, hospitals, community centres and so on.

The consequences for the PV industry are serious.Some investors (including a number of solar Venture Capital Trusts) are likely to wash their hands of the whole sector – defeated yet again by another bunch of politicians who simply don’t understand how investment markets work.The projected 17,000 jobs by the end of this year are highly unlikely to materialise – and some existing jobs may now be lost.

One wonders how Chris Huhne and his ever-so-green junior minister Greg Barker can so easily be stitched up by the Treasury – not just on this issue, but on the Green Investment Bank, the Green Deal, funding for The Carbon Trust and The Energy Saving Trust, and so on and so forth.It’s no way to run a government, that’s for sure, but that’s the way it works in Whitehall.

(By the way, it’s doubly ludicrous for DECC Ministers to sit there saying that PV is too expensive, when half their Department is bending every sinew to secure billions of pounds of public support for the nuclear industry over the next 15 years – with the full cooperation of the Treasury).

So there’s a lot at stake here: new jobs, new businesses, new skills, community involvement, empowered citizens, reductions in CO2 etc etc.All in place, all starting to come good.A sure-fire winner for the Government both in terms of its Big Society aspirations and its already pathetically frail Agenda for Growth.

But all that counts for nothing when you’re dealing with an unaccountable cabal of senior officials in Treasury who will (apparently) do literally anything they can to destroy the prospects of the PV industry here in the UK.