U.K. unveils clean energy plan

The U.K. government has put a price tag on the country's renewable energy future, and it comes to a hefty £100 billion.

The U.K. said the cash would come from private investment over the next 12 years, with government incentives paving the way to develop and deploy technologies including tidal, solar and wind power.

In the proposal from Prime Minister Gordon Brown, the country would extend and raise the level of its renewables obligation to encourage up to 30 percent to 35 percent of its electricity to come from renewable sources by 2020.

The country's Department for Business, Enterprise and Regulatory Reform said this would mean connecting around 30 to 40 gigawatts of additional renewable capacity, with much of it from offshore and onshore wind.

Brown outlined the plan at a Low Carbon Economy Summit in London.

"When I first proposed holding this conference last November the price of oil was $90 a barrel, up from just $60 a barrel the year before," he said.

"Today it is over $130 a barrel and the resulting energy and fuel price rises, as all of us know, are hurting families and hurting businesses everywhere, and they pose a real risk to the stability and a real risk of imposing damage on the global economy, for every country in the world is now having to face up to the consequences of this global change."

He said that although his country's aim must be to get the current high oil price down, he said they need to recognize that they have to take a new course.

"Meeting our climate change goals requires Britain to become a clean economy, that is, to replace many traditional fossil fuels with low carbon sources of energy right across this country, and to do so at much lower levels of energy demand than currently projected," said the prime minister.

"And we must start now."

Along with the planned incentives, the government has also published a new package of measures to speed up grid connections for renewable energy projects.

The Department for Business, Enterprise and Regulatory Reform said there's a backlog of around 10 gigawatts of wind energy at various stages of development currently waiting in the queue for grid connection.

The department said the newly published recommendations could lead to 1 GW of wind being connected within two years.

"This year Britain will surpass Denmark as the country with the highest operating offshore wind capacity in the world at over 400 megawatts," said Brown.

"By 2020 we will have installed around 14 gigawatts, that is around 3,000 offshore wind turbines, meeting up to 50 percent of our renewable electricity."

Last year, the country announced plans to develop up to 25 GW of offshore wind by 2020, in addition to the 8 GW already planned (see U.K. aims for 33GW of wind).

But this latest proposal calls for more onshore as well as offshore wind, with an estimated 4,000 new wind turbines onshore and 3,000 offshore.

The prime minister also said the country will need to substantially increase the energy that it gets from waste and biomass.

A recent report in the U.K. recommended capturing food waste and turning it into biofertilizer and renewable energy instead of sending it to landfills where it creates methane, a significant greenhouse gas (see Food waste costing billions in the U.K.).

That report, from the government-funded Waste and Resources Action Programme, or WRAP, said that wasted food accounted for 6.7 million tonnes of the food that ends up in landfills in the U.K. each year.

Heating accounts for the largest single proportion of the U.K.'s energy demand, at approximately 49 percent, according to the government, and also accounts for the largest proportion of the country's carbon emissions, at 47 percent.

Brown's proposal said the main technologies to increase renewable heat in the country are likely to be biomass-based technologies, such as heat from biomass waste, and micro-generation technologies, such as solar water heating and ground and air source heat pumps.

Footing the bill for the government incentives and transmission grid expansions will be homeowners, who are likely to see increases of 10 percent to 13 percent in electricity costs and a rise of 18 percent to 37 percent for gas as a result of the EU 2020 renewable energy target.

The U.K. agreed last year to a binding target that 20 percent of the EU's energy consumption should come from renewable sources by 2020.

The European Commission proposed that the U.K.'s contribution to that target should be to increase the share of renewables in the country's energy mix from 1.5 percent in 2006 to 15 percent by 2020.

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