Renewable energy on the increase

By PRSD, on Monday, July 21, 2008

posted by Cptn

Our old friends over at RegenSW (the sustainable energy agency), who have been fighting the good, renewable fight since way back when, have announced that ‘the south west’s renewable energy capacity has grown by 15 per cent in the past year’.

The findings are from Regen’s own annual Survey of Renewable Electricity and Heat Projects in South West England survey, published on Friday (July 18), which also shows that ’90MW of new capacity has been approved and is waiting to be built’.

But before you start wantonly leaving everything on standby, the total installed capacity of 189MW contributes just one per cent of the region’s heat and power use.

“The survey shows a mixed picture,” said Matthew Spencer, chief executive of Regen SW told the PRSD. “The region is falling short of its self-imposed target of 597MW of renewable electricity capacity by 2010 – but this doesn’t tell the full story. The fact that a record 90MW has been approved in the past year shows that things are improving. We still need more large renewables’ proposals to come forward, and the priority is to have them dealt with more quickly by the planning system.”

“Although we will miss our 2010 targets, we must now look forward to and respond to the UK’s new 2020 goals,” added Matthew.

“There are only 600 weeks to 2020, and we don’t have long to speed up deployment and ensure that our renewable energy businesses benefit from renewables becoming a mainstay of UK power and heat generation.”

It’s now that we mention the hard work of the little know Renewable Energy for Devon, with the unpronounceable acronym of RE4D, in pushing Devon’s micro renewable installations (making the installed electricity capacity of the count 29.40MW and the installed heat capacity 9.43). Cornwall and the Isles of Sicily are way out there with 57.28MW of installed electricity capacity and 11.63MW of installed heat capacity.