It was with great sadness last week that I announced the closure of Southern Solar – a firm I set up in 2002, which I grew for the first 10 years, doubling it every year.

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We were a company selected by government schemes to support high-growth business and an exemplar in the field. I set the company up to give people an easy way to do something positive about energy and climate change, and we have helped thousands of homeowners, schools, councils and businesses to reduce their bills and become renewable energy generators over the lifetime of the company.

It has never been straightforward running a company in the solar sector. Interference, often without any warning, from government has been a regular feature in the landscape: first with the grant schemes, and more recently with the feed-in tariff, which allowed individuals to receive payment from their power suppliers if they generate excess energy.

The number and severity of the changes that government has made is hard to believe; closing grant schemes after 40 minutes each month because they were too successful, or slashing the feed-in tariff illegally (as was shown by the cases to stop the cuts in the high court) and very deeply. It seems that every few months there would be another consultation changing the way the sector was supported.

As a sector we are easily labelled as self-interested subsidy-junkies. When, in fact, we are one of the few energy generation technologies that has the opportunity to become subsidy-free. This is possible in the next few years, given a stable environment, and that is where everyone in the industry wants to get to.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest ‘What we, and the 700,000 people who have installed solar across the UK, are part of is nothing short of an energy revolution.’ Photograph: Alamy

The effect of all this interference is a mixed blessing; yes the sector has grown dramatically, but there have been many casualties along the way, and last week Southern Solar was added to that list. We have been far from the only one; many companies have gone in the last few years. But let’s face it, who wants to talk about failure so publicly?

In 2012, when the feed-in tariff was last slashed hugely, I had a team of 100 people operating from eight locations around the country – in many ways a market-leading profitable business. After those changes to the feed-in tariff, and a very significant drop in the overall UK solar market the following year, our monthly sales dropped to one quarter of what they were and we had to go through the process of sacking people and scaling down the company.

Growing a company is expensive; recruitment, IT, vehicles, training and tools all need to be funded and found. We had invested over £500,000 in that year to grow to meet the market, and suddenly those resources were rendered surplus to requirements on the policy whim of a minister. All that investment and effort was entirely wasted.

Scaling back a company is also expensive, and we had to work hard over the last three years to keep the business moving, while managing the losses caused by those challenges. It took over two years of immense stress and hard work by all involved to slim our team to less than a fifth of what it was, and to raise significant new investment to get the business back on an even keel. We had just about achieved this when these post-election announcements came along, which, if carried out in the form proposed, are so extreme there won’t be a solar market of any scale in the UK for the next few years. With that as the backdrop, it became apparent that we could not carry on.

The human cost of this saga is immense. There is no way I could inflict another few years of sustained stress on myself or my family. The team I built at Southern Solar was made up of excellent people and they have all worked incredibly hard in very tricky conditions to keep the company moving. They are hardworking people, with families, trying to do something positive for society and the world in general – but they are now unemployed. The UK solar industry deserves far better from a government that claims to be on the side of the British worker.

The effects of shutting the solar sector down also go much wider than painful job losses. In our case alone, hundreds of thousands of pounds of investment will be lost. Many others not directly in the solar industry are also affected, as these losses ripple out into other companies in the construction industry and in allied areas. Will there be the same support for solar workers as there have been for those affected by Redcar?

For many of us, solar is a passion. When you see how easy it is to transform a building into a mini-power station, it becomes obvious that this will become completely normal in the coming years. Couple these systems with energy storage and you have a lot less need for the current centralised electricity system. What we, and the 700,000 people who have installed solar across the UK, are part of is nothing short of an energy revolution. It is one that individuals and communities form a key part of. So it is even more mystifying why the government would be acting so irresponsibly towards this community of pioneers, which is risking a great deal to open the path to a long-term sustainable energy future for the UK.

In fact it amounts to nothing less than political vandalism on a grand scale. We, the public, have funded the growth of the UK solar industry for a few years now. Now, when it is getting close to not needing any subsidy at all, we are going to close it down. That’s just plain illogical, and can only be ideologically driven.

The feed-in tariff that supports solar and other renewable technology added about £9 to your energy bill in 2014. But the main reason household bills went up in the last parliament was an increase in wholesale energy costs.

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If the government truly cared about hardworking families, then it would be supporting the renewable energy and energy efficiency industries fully, rather than shutting them down at short notice. The only real way to permanently stabilise bills is to use less fossil energy and generate our own renewable local power. There are hundreds of thousands of jobs to be had here if done right.

It is not too late for the government to do a U-turn on this, and that is exactly what it needs to do. It turns out that to get the UK solar industry subsidy-free in just a few years’ time it only needs another £2-3 a year on household bills. Contrast that with the billions of pounds being offered to Chinese and French state-owned nuclear firms to build the Hinkley C nuclear facility and you will understand why people in the sector are angry.

That this government, the party of business, would rather support massive state-owned firms overseas rather than homegrown entrepreneurs surely flies in the face of what the Conservatives stand for.

It is too late for Southern Solar, but there is still time for government to see sense and announce a structured plan to prevent meltdown in the sector. If they want to go to the climate talks in Paris with any credibility, this is one problem they need to fix urgently before it leaves a permanent black mark on their record.

The “greenest government ever” has proved itself to be nothing of the kind, but there is an opportunity to redeem itself here, but it needs to act fast.