Government in Danger of Missing Renewable Power Targets - Lamb

3.04.52pm BST (GMT +0100) Thu 27th Oct 2005

The Liberal Democrats today published new figures which suggests that the Government's could miss its target of generating 20% of UK power from renewable sources by 2020.

A Parliamentary Answer to Liberal Democrat Shadow Trade and Industry Secretary, Norman Lamb MP, shows that while the overall level of spending on research into renewable fuels has increased, funding is going into the wrong areas.

Funding into wind power has increased dramatically despite the fact that this sort of technology can currently only generate erratic amounts of power. This is in contrast to the plentiful Biomass fuels, which only this week a Government taskforce recommended increasing funding to.

Commenting, Mr Lamb said:

"The increase in support for research into renewable technologies is welcome, but the Government needs to adopt a more balanced approach to its funding if it is to meet its commitment to increase the amount of power generated by renewable sources to 20% of total output by 2020.

"Last year, over 44% of all DTI funding into renewable technologies went to developing wind power compared to 14% in 2000. This was in contrast to funding levels for research into Biomass technology which fell from 28% in 2000 to only 8% in 2005."

ENDS

Notes:

• Biomass Task Force Report published on recommend government spend £10-20milion a year on grants to support biomass heating.

• Total expenditure in Wind Power increased by 1955% between 99/00 and 04/05 compared to a more moderate increase of 82% in Biomass

• Sir Brian Gill of Biomass TaskForce stated "This is the low hanging fruit on the carbon -saving tree"

• The statistics (available from the Liberal Democrat press office) were provided to Norman Lamb in response to Parliamentary Question "To ask the Secretary of State for Trade and Industry how much his Department spent on research into renewable energy technologies in (a) 2005 and (b) each of the previous 5 years"