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Energy White Paper
The DTI's Energy White Paper, published on 24 February, presents the Government's vision for energy policy for the UK, reviewing what the Government will need to have achieved by 2020 and looking ahead to 2050 to set the overall context.
White Paper Details
The White Paper builds on the Performance and Innovation Unit's Energy Review, published in February 2002, and aims to:
- work towards cutting emissions of carbon dioxide by 60% by 2050;
- maintain the reliability of energy supplies;
- promote competitive energy markets in the UK and beyond; and
- ensure that every home is adequately and affordably heated.
The report recognises that climate change is largely caused by burning fossil fuels and focuses on the potential of energy efficiency, renewables and clean low carbon transport to achieve the desired reductions in greenhouse gas emissions. A range of practical measures have been announced to achieve the goals of the Energy White Paper, the most relevant to our industry being:
- an ambition to double the share of electricity from renewables by 2020 from the existing 2010 target of 10%;
- £60m in new money for renewable projects bringing spending on renewable energy up to £348 million in total over four years;
- reforming planning rules to unblock hurdles to renewable energy; and
- a new carbon trading system to come into effect from around 2005 that will give energy suppliers and consumers incentives to switch to cleaner energy.
Encouragingly, the Government's broad vision of the energy system in 2020 states that there will need to be much more local generation, in part from medium to small local/community power plant, fuelled by locally sourced renewables including locally grown biomass and locally generated waste.The report later states that biomass and waste technologies need to gain momentum, but most of the discussion centres on the role of biomass. Disappointingly, only brief mention is made of waste, where the report notes that the Government is considering the recommendations in the Strategy Unit report (November 2002) to ensure that there are financial incentives to develop new waste technologies, such as pyrolysis, gasification and anaerobic digestion. No mention appears to have been made in the report of the contribution of landfill gas as a renewable energy source.
February 2003 
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