REHEAT – INSIGHTS FROM INDUSTRY REQ
FINANCING RENEWABLE EQUIPMENT
Finance and awareness – the key to greater RHI take-up
R
enewable heat generation has grown steadily, increasing on average by 11.3% year-on-year between 2009 and 2012. However,
growth will need to accelerate to an average 18% year-on-year between 2013 and 2020 if the Government’s ambition of 12% renewable heat by 2020 is to be achieved, with contributions coming mainly from biomass and heat pumps. A rapid scale-up in investment levels will be required if the overall 2020 renewable energy targets are to be reached. This would require investment of £23.6 billion in renewable heat between 2013 and 2020. The barriers to implementation of the Renewable Heat Incentive have been analysed and tracked for some time. Back in 2008, the Department for Business, Enterprise and Regulatory Reform (BERR) commissioned a study which clearly laid out some of these obstacles, both from
More recently, European Renewable
The UK may be behind target for renewable heat, but the
barriers can be overcome, says Darren Riva of Siemens Financial Services
the supplier’s and the buyer’s viewpoint. These covered hurdles such as the lack of skilled installers, planning permission obstacles (especially for biomass), business disruption and space issues for the buyer and lack of awareness from buyer communities.
Energy Council (EREC) also announced that our current growth will fail to meet our 2020 renewable energy target of using 15% of renewable energy sources. In fact, this announcement showed we were not alone, by any means. Only three of the 11 EU member states involved are expected to meet their targets. Those three are Austria, Italy, and Sweden. But the fact that we’re not the only country falling behind is no cause for complacency. Some barriers to renewable energy technologies were also published in EREC’s
report. These barriers included: Mixed signals from the Government causing
for some technologies.
Poor awareness of the Renewable Heat Incentive (RHI) and complexity of the incentive. So we can see some worrying similarities
between the two reports, one in 2008 and one in 2013. Certainly, awareness amongst businesses and public institutions about the advantages of renewables, and practical guidance on how to go about making the transition, are critical. A skilled labour force is evidently a key issue too. But perhaps one of the most important pillars of such a wider public awareness programme is to stress how renewables can be made affordable – a barrier that is inexplicably not highlighted in the Government research documents.
THE POWERFUL COMBINATION OF FINANCING, SKILLS DEVELOPMENT AND
PUBLIC EDUCATION SHOULD BE ABLE TO RADICALLY ACCELERATE THE TAKE-UP RATE.’
14 REQ RENEWABLE ENERGY QUARTERLY | | AUTUMN 2014
www.r-e-a.net
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