DECC has published the UK’s renewable energy roadmap. It focuses on the need to expand eight renewable energy technologies in order to meet the UK’s target to deliver 15% of the UK’s energy consumption from renewable sources by 2020.
Actions the Government are taking to facilitate this aspiration include improving access to the grid for new projects, ensuring long term certainty for investors, tackling planning pre and post consent delays and encouraging innovation.
The roadmap suggests that an increase of 18GW of off shore and 13GW of onshore wind will be needed, alongside 6GW of electricity generated from Biomass. They comment that further consideration on the availability of feedstock for Biomass and actions to restrict land-filling of waste wood must be undertaken to achieve these targets.
The Government expect the renewable heat incentive to encourage the increased deployment of renewable heating technologies including biomass, ground and air source heat pumps. The high growth rate required in all these technologies to meet the overarching 15% target will be challenging, but the Government expects this growth to bring down the costs of renewable generation.
Currently the supply from renewables accounts for 3.3% of energy consumption. The Government have interim targets for the years 2011/2012 of 4.0% and 2012/2013 of 5.4%. Annual updates of whether growth in renewables is in-line with these targets will be crucial in pushing forward progress.