More than a quarter of the UK’s electricity came from renewables this spring, official figures show.
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For the first time in history, renewable energy has outweighed coal-fired power in the UK’s electricity generation mix.
United Kingdom Energy Secretary Amber Rudd has announced cuts to a slew of incentives for renewable energy, citing unexpectedly high installation levels that threaten to eat up the subsidy budget.
The Department of Energy and Climate Change (DECC) said the growth was thanks to higher wind speeds and increased capacity from the continued expansion of several large scale offshore wind farms. Renewable UK’s chief executive Maria McCaffery added that the new statistics indicate that the country is being dependent increasingly on renewable sources.
This was an increase of 8.6 percentage points over the same period of past year when the figure stood at 16.4 percent, according to the statistics. Gas provided 30%. The new statistics show that Britain is relying increasingly on dependable renewable sources to keep the country powered up, with onshore and offshore wind playing the leading roles in our clean energy mix. Nuclear power was third with 21.5%, while coal fell back to fourth, with 20.5%.
“Scotland continues to make strong progress in the renewable electricity sector, but there remains much more to be done on renewable heat where now only 3 per cent of our heating demand comes from renewables”.
She called for clearer signals from Government that it was backing new projects. So far, we’ve had a series of disappointing announcements from Ministers since May which unfortunately betray a lack of positive ambition at the heart of Government.
It said government support has already driven down the cost of renewable energy significantly, helping technologies to “stand on their own two feet”.
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“[It] is impacting the industry’s cost of capital and is additionally creating some difficulty in securing long term finance for certain projects, at least until the legislation has reached Royal Assent ” Chief executive Andrew Whalley said it had inflicted significant damage to a developing industry which employs tens of thousands of people and has made an increasing contribution to the generation of cheap and clean energy. It’s fantastic to see that a quarter of our electricity has come from renewable sources over a three month period for the first time.
