Prime minister Gordon Brown, has on 26 June 2008, announced what he describes as “a green revolution in the making” as part of the British government’s commitment to achieve the UK’s target of supplying 15 per cent of its energy requirements from renewable sources by 2020. Brown said the plans amount to a 10-fold increase in the deployment of renewables over the current level and a 300 per cent increase in existing plans. The CO2 savings brought about through the plans would be 20m tonnes annually, and would require a £100bn investment over the next 12 years from the private – not public – sector.
On a practical level the PM outlined several key steps to making the plans reality. They include speeding up the planning process to renewables applications, such as thousands of onshore as well as offshore wind turbines. He said there would be financial incentives, and feed-in tariffs would be introduced and ‘barriers’ to the national grid accepting in flows would be removed. We at whatgreenhome.com have campaigned for the adoption of feed-in tariffs and are delighted that the government has acknowledged the key role it can play in the net-reduction of CO2 emissions.
Now, if we are to achieve what the PM has said the plans will do: produce 30 per cent of our electricity, 14 per cent of our heat and up to 10 per cent of our transport fuels from renewables by 2020, the government’s hugely pressing task is to stop talking and start acting. The omens do not look promising. In the very same speech, Brown said: “So today I want to launch a serious national debate about how we are to achieve our targets.” We are not advocating a dictatorship, far from it, but we really require – and need right now – is not more dialogue and consultation but strategic plans of action to achieve the ‘15/20’ target.
