The Rail, Engineering, Energy, Renewables, Power Blog

Figures from the Department for Energy and Climate Change and Ofgem show that the UK failed to reach its target of producing 10% of electricity from renewables last year. In fact, we fell well short of the 10% target and only managed to produce 6.5% from renewable sources.

After analysing the data, the Renewable Energy Foundation has asked how this could happen considering the large amount of investment that has been ploughed into low carbon technology.

REF’s director of policy and research, Dr John Constable, remarked that the 2010 target has been missed by a mile despite the very high costs to consumers. The EU target for 2020 is now clearly beyond reach, he added.

He went on to suggest that the UK should abandon its target-led renewable policy and replace it with “a more feasible and reasoned strategy”.

In what will give the opponents of onshore wind power even more ammunition, the data revealed that onshore wind turbine power generation dropped six percentage points to just 21% last year.

Under the European Union renewable energy targets, 15% of the UK’s energy must come from renewable by 2020. But how are we going to achieve that when we fell more than 33% short of 2010’s target?

What measures do you think the government should put in place to increase the amount of renewable energy we produce?

Tags: carbon, carbon neutral, carbon technology, climate change, department for energy, dept for energy, Electricity, low carbon, Renewable Energy, renewables

This entry was posted on Wednesday, April 20th, 2011 at 10:57 am and is filed under Outside of Work. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.