Renewable energy is powering forward in the UK, according to the 2012 update to the Renewable Energy Roadmap published today by Energy Secretary Edward Davey.
Significant progress has been made on the rollout of renewable energy across the United Kingdom from July 2011 to July 2012, including a 40 per cent increase over the same period in renewable electricity capacity. Now over 10 per cent of all electricity generated is coming from renewables and a five-fold increase in solar PV capacity.
The Roadmap shows that the UK is on track to meeting our first interim target on the way to the ambitious European target to source 15% of all energy from renewable sources by 2020.
Edward Davey, Energy and Climate Change Secretary, said: “It’s a fantastic achievement that more than ten percent of our power now comes from renewables, given the point from which we started.”
The Roadmap also shows that in the last year the cost of solar PV has fallen by 50%, with the technology now identified as a key technology in the Roadmap update.
DECC has revised its estimate of PV’s large-scale ground-mounted deployment potential to March 2017 from 720MW to 4.6GW, a welcome acknowledgment of the case we put forward. Note however that DECC emphasises this is not a target, but a modelling assumption of the “maximum technical deployment potential of large-scale ground-mounted solar PV in the UK in this period”. From modelling undertaken with National Grid, DECC consider that 20 GW of solar PV (both large- and small-scale) is the theoretical technical maximum that can be accommodated on the grid by 2020.
Solar photovoltaic (PV) industry developers were today given certainty on projects to be supported under the Government’s Renewables Obligation (RO).
Edward Davey, Energy and Climate Change Secretary, said: “We want to see a healthy solar industry that grows in a sustainable way. That’s why our support levels reflect the fall in the cost of the technology.”
In order to incentivise solar projects on buildings, building-mounted solar PV projects will receive higher rates than ground-mounted projects. This will encourage the installation of solar projects at large factory or warehouse buildings.
From 1st April 2013, ground mounted projects will get 1.6 ROCs per MWh and building-mounted projects will be 1.7 ROCs per MWh. Both levels are higher than in the original consultation document.
DECC also confirmed that developers of solar PV installations will continue to able to choose between the Feed in Tariff scheme and the Renewables Obligation for projects between 50kW and 5MW.