A breath of fresh air?
The UK has recently set a renewable record – 22% of the UK’s energy is now generated by wind, beating the previous record of 21% set earlier in August and previously 20% of generation just before Christmas last year.
The wind generation on the 17 August represented 5.7GW, roughly three times the capacity of Ratcliffe-on-Soar power station or enough to power about 15 million homes and more impressively wind provided a greater proportion of the nation’s power than coal. The highest total generation from wind historically was a little over 7GW on the 7 January, feeding into a much larger winter demand.
To put these impressive statistics into context, in 2013 renewables accounted for just over 5% of the UK’s total energy supply with a binding target of 15% by 2020. However, the success of wind mentioned above comes at a price, with renewable energy subsidies costing in excess of £3 billion per year of which approximately half goes to onshore and offshore wind.
Looking at the energy trilemma of cost, carbon and continuity, renewable energy is an obvious solution, especially with the nation’s reliance on imported energy where the UK’s electricity generation mix is dominated by gas (27%), coal (33%) and nuclear (20%) of which a significant proportion is imported (40% of coal from Russia and over half of our gas requirements from Norway, Europe and Qatar).
These imports have a number of major impacts on the UK including energy security issues (especially in the light of the change in relations with Russia) and a significant negative influence on the balance of payments. In improving energy security there are two aspects, supply and demand and clean technologies are key to both sides of this equation, reducing demand by innovative energy saving and efficient technologies and to new, cleaner generation technologies to improve the capacity and quality of the supply.
The challenge is real and is not going away anytime soon – in 2012 it was reported that by 2050 Germany was predicting a drop of 25% in electricity demand as opposed to the UK’s predicted rise of over 60%. These figures are not designed to be “doom and gloom”, but a rallying call to Nottingham’s Clean Tech community to increase their efforts to take advantage of the massive potential rewards in this sector.