Renew On Line (UK) 27

Extracts from the July-Aug 2000 edition of Renew
These extracts only represent about 25% of it

1. DTI Pushes Renewables to market

"We are moving towards a market-based approach, the best way to meet our 10% target". So said Energy Minister, Helen Liddell, at a recent meeting of PRASEG, the cross-party Parliamentary Renewable and Sustainable Energy Group. She went on "By creating a guaranteed market for renewables until 2025, the Government is offering the UK's renewable energy industry an unprecedented opportunity to expand. Now is the time for the industry to evolve from marginal to mainstream status. It will contribute substantially both to the protection of our environment and to the diversity and security of our energy supplies."

She added "The choice of renewable technology is for the market and not for Government, though we may back development of currently expensive technologies such as offshore wind energy and energy crops, so that they can make a greater and more economical contribution in the future".

However, despite the obvious need for (and earlier hints of) a commitment to support offshore wind and wave, no specific support programmes were mentioned.

But the DTI is now collecting up proposal for new research projects- to be funded out of the expanded R&D allocation - now increased to £14m (for 2000/2001) and rising to £18m for 2001/2002. Up to £15m is evidently available for ‘shared cost projects’ covering the programmes present priorities - which the DTI lists as ‘biofuels, photovoltaics, hydro, advanced fuel cells, on-shore and offshore-wind and embedded generation’. (See www.dti.gov.uk/renewable)

Although not mentioned in this list, there may well be some tidal stream and wave energy projects that could benefit from money in this round of funding. But £15m in shared cost projects across the very wide list of areas listed by the DTI is hardly going to be enough to ensure that offshore wind lifts off- it’s ready for full scale development now.

Gas and Coal live again

Meanwhile, somewhat perversely given its commitment to carbon emissions reduction, coal seem to be getting serious funding again. The DTI announced that the gas moratorium would be lifted in October, once the Utility Bill was in force and NETA was running, but to maintain the level playing field, it allocated up to £100m to support the coal industry during the transition. The revival of the dash for gas would help reduce net carbon emissions, if it’s at the expense of coal, but the plan seems to be to restrict gas, so as to to maintain diversity of fuel sources, by supporting coal.

This policy shift was prefigured in the DETR Climate Change report (see Reviews), which argued basically that, as far as carbon reductions were concerned, all would be well once the Climate Change Levy and the Renewables Obligation were in place. The levy is meant to come into force next April, but the Obligation may take much longer to set up- a year or two perhaps. Meanwhile we are likely to see a new dash for gas, coupled with a small revival of coals fortunes - or at least a temporary respite from terminal decline.

The DTI’s Stephen Byers rather apologetically noted that the German, French and Spanish coal industries benefitted from Government subsidies, so why shouldn’t ours. Well maybe, but why not subsidise renewables - the technologies of the future rather than the technologies of the past?

..but UK still trails behind rest of EU

Despite having the best resource in Europe for wind and wave power, the UK is set to be near the bottom of the European renewable energy league for the next ten years. The UK’s target of producing 10% of electricity from renewable energy by 2010, is still well below the proposed overall European Union target of obtaining 23.5% of its electricity from renewables by the end of the decade. Only Belgium and Luxembourg have lower percentage national targets than the UK.

The figures for the proposed pan-european targets were released ahead of the forthcoming draft renewable energy directive - so it’s all still provisional. But if accepted by the European Commission, the indicative targets, although not mandatory, will put pressure on the UK, as well as some other countries, to do better.

In particular, according to the ENDS Daily news service, the EC view is that there remain "positive potentials" for increasing renewables "which are not fully reflected in the national targets" in Finland, France, Greece, Luxembourg, the Netherlands and Portugal - strangely the UK seems to be off the hook at least in this list.

(No figures yet for Denmark or Sweden)

Source: EC: http://europa.eu.int/comm

The new targets emerged as EU energy commissioner Loyola de Palacio announced that the forthcoming draft renewable energy directive would propose national renewables targets. ENDS notes that ‘ Although these are to be non-binding, she stressed that, under her plan, the Commission would monitor countries' progress and "present proposals" should any fall behind. Even without this threat, it would be politically difficult for countries to fail to meet approved targets.’

The figures show how Ms de Palacio's department thinks the"burden" should be shared of increasing the overall EU share of renewable electricity from 14.5% currently to 23.5% in 2010. The energy directorate calculates that this would fulfill the Commission's 1997 goal of doubling the share of renewables in overall energy production from 6% to 12% by the same date. But none of this is binding, and represents something of a ‘back track’ from a fully harmonised support system - which the EC has now postponed for five years.