Is Britain ready for huge increase in wind power?

Around 400,000 new employment opportunities are expected in a massive expansion of renewable energy as Britain strives to meet two demanding climate change targets. The plan is to cut the UK’s carbon emissions by 34% on 1990 levels by 2020 and derive 15% of all energy from renewable sources by the same date.

The British government is set to share its “The UK Low Carbon Transition Plan” and Renewable Energy Strategy, setting out how Britain plans to meet a European Union target of getting 15% of its energy from renewable sources by 2020.

“What we’re trying to set out on Wednesday (July 15) ... is a route map, ...a sense of how do we go from here to 2020 and beyond,” Energy and Climate Change Secretary Ed Miliband told the BBC.

As per the strategy paper, Britain needs to spend more than £100 billion on renewable energy infrastructure by 2020 (including 7,000 wind turbines).

A new report has indicated that Britain’s energy system is already capable of taking a large amount of wind power.

Friends of the Earth, Greenpeace, RSPB and WWF, who commissioned the report, are calling on the UK Government to put in place funding and incentives to encourage investment in much more wind power and to grant priority access to the energy market and the electricity grid.

It highlighted that the National Grid is more than able to manage the variable input created by wind power, as it is already designed to manage fluctuations in demand and supply. The report shows that there is no technical reason why a significant amount of energy generated by wind cannot be used to supply the National Grid.

A section of the media has also highlighted that the government’s plans to concentrate on wind power is a challenging task.



Source : WEU