Author: Great Britain: Parliament: House of Commons: Committee of Public Accounts

Publisher: The Stationery Office

Published: 2010-11-30

Total Pages: 44

ISBN-13: 9780215555434

Developing renewable energy technologies is vitally important if the UK is to help tackle climate change and maintain secure national energy supplies. But the Department of Energy and Climate Change (the Department) is going to miss its target to supply 10% of electricity from renewable sources by the end of 2010. The Department is responsible for ensuring a series of targets are met over the next 40 years but direct government funding for developing renewable energy technologies is delivered through a complex web of organisations that the Department does not control. In consequence the Department does not have a clear understanding of how much has been spent or what has been achieved. Between 2000 and 2009, the Department and its predecessors failed to use nearly half of the resources available to it to encourage innovation in renewable energy. This is a wasted opportunity for providing investment that could have helped increase the supply of renewable energy. The Committee is concerned that the Department committed to a new, extremely ambitious and legally-binding EU target to supply 15% of all the UK's energy from renewable sources by 2020, despite not having a clear plan for how it would achieve this. The Department needs to get the best value and impacts from the Renewables Obligation. Achieving the 2050 target for an 80% reduction in greenhouse gas emissions will need further innovation in renewable energy technologies to increase supplies after 2020 but the Department has not set out any innovation milestones it will need to meet.