MP’s have criticised the UK’s progress on meeting renewable energy targets. MP’s on the Committee of Public Accounts say it’s not clear how much different sources of renewable energy will cost and how successful some of these technologies are.
Chair of the Committee is Margaret Hodge who said that the Department of Energy and Climate Change needed “a greater sense of urgency and purpose”.
The committee has been told that the country is set to miss its target of getting 10% of its electricity from sources of renewable energy by the end of this year and in fact won’t achieve this target until 2012. The Department of Energy and Climate Change has been criticised for not doing enough to deal with the fact that progress on the deployment of renewable energy has been slow.
Margaret Hodge said that despite the fact that £180m of funds had been made available for the development of renewable energy much of this money had not been spent. She said “progress in meeting renewable energy targets has been unacceptably slow over the last decade”.
MP’s criticised the Energy Department for not being ready for the future even though the UK had signed up to a legally binding target set by the EU to supply 15% of the energy in the UK from sources of renewable energy by 2020.
The committee said that the UK had signed up to this target with no “clear plans, targets for each renewable energy technology, estimates of funding required or understanding how the rate at which planning applications for onshore wind turbines were being rejected might affect progress”.
The report by the committee raises questions about energy security within the UK. It’s quite concerning that the UK has signed up to targets with no clears plans on how to best achieve them. In only a few years time coal fired power stations and nuclear power plants are set to be decommissioned and renewable energy sources were supposed to fill the gap.
