A renewables policy to despair of

With the best will in the world, one must sometimes despair of the completely inexplicable decisions of certain government departments.

Recently, I posted a piece about the difficulties that Labour now faces if it’s going to be brave about a serious 'green recovery package'.

At which point, all sorts of stuff began to surface about the mind-boggling situation that the government seems to have got itself into in terms of the current support for renewables here in the UK.

Here’s what it looks like. The UK is signed up to a Europe-wide process that mandates it to source 15% of all its energy (electricity, heat and transport) from renewables by 2020. Everybody knows we are massively off the pace at the moment – and even Ed Miliband at his most optimistic acknowledges that we haven’t got a hope in hell of getting from where we are now (performing worse than any other country in Europe, apart from Luxembourg and Malta) to where we need to be without radical new measures.

What we’ve got going for us at the moment is the ROCs (Renewables Obligation Certificates) scheme and the worthy but terminally inadequate Low Carbon Buildings Programme. The demand for the latter’s limited largesse (just a few tens of millions) to support the installation of photovoltaics and other micro-renewables is strong, and it’s already run out for this year. No more money, apparently, till the new feed-in tariffs kick in in April 2010.

That’s not good. But there’s something even more foolish going on. At exactly the moment when biomass boilers and the wood fuel industry is beginning to make a real difference, all grant funding has dried up until the new Renewables Heat Initiative kicks in, in (wait for it!) April 2011. Between now and April 2011, as I learned recently on a visit to the UK’s first ever exhibition of wood fuel technologies (which could, by the way, meet all of the 15% target for renewable heat!), this nascent but strategically crucial industry will struggle to survive.

And then I heard that Iberdrola (one of the biggest renewable energy companies in the world) is halving its investments in renewables in the UK, not just because of the credit crunch, but because of its very grave doubts about the UK government’s renewables policy – and seriousness of intent.

It really is bonkers, isn’t it? Old BERR clearly lives on in new DECC and ministerial words clearly count for little at the moment.