U.K. Reveals 'Challenging' Renewables Roadmap

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Written by Martin Lynch, European News Editor for Industrial Info (Galway, Ireland) -- The U.K. government has released its Renewables Roadmap with details about how it expects to generate 15% of its electricity from renewable sources by 2020.

The government claimed that a four-fold increase in the current level of renewable energy will be needed by the end of the decade.

The Roadmap comes at the same time as the launch of its Electricity Market Reform White Paper, which sets out the changes that need to be made to the U.K.'s energy investment, generation and distribution models to secure its energy supply for the coming decades.

A quarter of the U.K.'s generating capacity -- mainly old coal-fired and nuclear power plants - will be shut down in the coming decade, which is expected to lead to an energy crisis. The government expects that €125 billion ($177 billion) will be needed to build the equivalent of 20 large power stations and upgrade the grid. The energy mix will concentrate on gas, new nuclear, renewables and carbon capture and storage (CCS).

With regards to renewables, the Roadmap identifies eight technologies that have either the greatest potential to help the U.K. meet the 2020 target, or offer great potential for the following decades. Those eight are onshore and offshore wind, marine energy, biomass electricity and heat, ground source and air source heat pumps and renewable transport technologies. However, solar photovoltaic (PV), deep geothermal and hydropower have been excluded from the top eight, and relegated to the 'Other' section of the roadmap for technologies with less future potential.

"We have a Herculean task ahead of us," admitted Secretary of State for Energy and Climate Change, Chris Huhne. "The scale of investment needed in our electricity system in order to keep the lights on is more than twice the rate of the last decade. The fact is that the current electricity market is not able to meet that challenge. Without action, there is a risk of uncomfortably low capacity margins from around the end of the decade and a far higher chance of costly blackouts."

Speaking about the Renewables Roadmap, Huhne added: "Growth on that kind of scale will be challenging, but will be necessary if we are to make the U.K. more energy secure, help protect consumers from fossil fuel price fluctuations, drive investment in new jobs and businesses, and keep us on track to meet our carbon reduction objectives for the coming decades. It will require industry to carry on making the case for renewables and Government and the Devolved Administrations to break through the barriers that are stopping new schemes being built."

Driving down the costs of renewable energy will be a key part of that process and a new, industry led task force is being tasked with reducing the costs of offshore wind to £100/MWh by 2020.

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