Who backs renewables in the UK?

Who backs renewables in the UK?  Well just about everyone now- 83% of the public, according to the most recent national poll.  And the government is committed to expanding renewable as part of its response to Climate Change. However what matters practically is the level of industrial and technical support for actual hardware projects. So what does that backing look like? And will it sustain expansion?

Renewable energy schemes at various scales has been backed in the UK by a range of large power companies, including German-owned E.ON and French-owned EDF, as well as by smaller players. As a result, the UK now gets over a third of its power from renewables.

Most of the companies involved with providing this are members of one or other of the major trade associations, RUK (Renewable UK) and REA (Renewable Energy Association), who promote the development and spread of the technologies. RUK (which grew out of the British Wind Energy Association) focuses on mainly wind and marine energy, REA tends to cover solar and bioenergy more, but, although there is some overlap, an attempt at a merger failed awhile back, and the Solar Trade Association also remains separate.

Nuanced variations in emphasis are also to be found amongst the various independent energy-related research units and academic institutions, most of which have broader interests than just renewables.  The UK Energy Research Centre, which was set up in 2004, with nodes in a number of Universities, produces incisive technology strategy and policy assessment reports, reflecting the interests and capabilities of some of its key constituents. For example, while Imperial College London has focused on power system integration, the Energy Change Institute at Oxford has focused on the demand side. However, there is some overlap amongst the groups, and new research coalitions emerge regularly from amongst the pool of academics active in the field, e.g. at Sussex University, Exeter, and University College London.

The academic mix is thus wide, and there can be diverencies in views on specific issues as well as different strategic orientations.  While the emphasis for some of the UKERC-linked groups has often been on social and planning issues, a more industrial-orientated approach was taken by the hybrid private-public funded Energy Technologies Institute (ETI), which was set up in 2007, with bases at Loughborough and Birmingham University. Although funding for the ETI has now ended, some of its work is being continued under the research Catapult system. In fact, just about all UK University have groups/projects on climate policy and some also carry out renewables R&D. Most offer courses on renewable energy, mostly at Masters level, although the University of Exeter run an undergraduate degree at its Falmouth Campus, while the Open University offers a long established web-based one-year module on renewables.

Overall then, the UK has good academic and research infrastructure in the field, which is reflected in the fact that many of the leading journals are UK-based, although of course their coverage is global. It is an expanding field: the volume of technological research and analytic policy publications growing dramatically with, in addition to many specialist journals, some still trying to cover the whole field, for example, Elsevier’s Renewable Energy, although there is now also an expanding social science literature with broader energy/climate policy coverage. There are also many technical and trade journals, these days with online versions most of them with a global reach, notably Windpower Monthly and the Solarpower Portal, as well as range of web-based news sites which provide technical and policy updates. We like to think that our long running Renew is still the best all round for UK and global coverage of the key technical developments and policy battles.  But you may also find the outputs of some of the green pressure groups (in the UK, Greenpeace, FoE, WWF and so on) useful, although more erratic in that their interests extend well beyond renewables.

Finally of course, there is the government!  At present renewables fall under the Dept. of Business Energy and Industrial Strategy, which provides occasional reports and policy documents on energy as does the linked Select Committee, while the opposition parties sometimes lobby on specific issues. The long running all-party Parliamentary Renewable and Sustainable Energy Group acts as a forum of debate. And the Committee on Climate Change provides formal policy advice.

The sometimes tortuous story of how all these institutions and groups and their predecessors interacted to shape the development of renewables up to 2020, is told in some detail, starting in the 1970s, in my recent book ‘Renewable Energy in UK: Past, Present and Future’. It’s a story of initial enthusiasm on the fringe followed by gradual economic success, despite the continuing support that had been given by most UK governments to nuclear power.   My latest book, ‘Renewable energy: Can it deliver?’ takes a wider global look at what might happen next, as renewable enter the main stream around the world.

Looking globally of course, there are many players seeking to shape how things go, including the International Renewable Energy Agency based in Abu Dhabi, and countries like Germany and China who are pushing renewables very hard: the UK has tended to trail behind. However, with offshore wind booming, the UK is now doing a bit better and the ‘Renewables Pipeline Tracker', produced by the Cornwall Insight trade group claims that 38.7GW of ‘shovel ready’ renewables and energy storage projects are currently planned across 845 locations in the UK. So there is plenty to be getting on with and, it seems, support is available for that, although the economic impacts of Covid 19 may slow progress for a while.

So what next? The National Infrastructure Commission has recently claimed that it should be possible to get 65% of UK power from renewables by 2030, while National Grid ESO have produced a new edition of their challenging Future Energy Scenarios looking to renewables maybe supplying up to 80% of UK power by 2050 - see my next post. The much delayed White Paper on Energy is meant to be coming out this autumn, so that may give some indication of how rapidly the UK will try to move ahead in terms of power and also other energy uses.