10 November 2008 | Luca Del Buono

 

The British government insists it is on track to hit ambitious renewable energy targets, but the industry says a swathe of problems in developing wind farms threaten to blow the plans off course.

Executives say difficulties in building farms and connecting them to the national power grid, unwillingness by investors to fund them and a shortage of turbines could stop Britain hitting its target of generating 15 percent of its electricity from renewable sources by 2020.

Ministers say the UK generates enough electricity from wind energy to power more than 1.5 million homes and they are studying plans to produce enough for every British home.

"Expansion of offshore wind remains on course," energy minister Mike O'Brien told a conference in London last month.

Yet at the current rate which wind farms are being built, the UK will generate only about 5 to 7 percent of its energy from renewables by 2020, Scottish & Southern Energy Plc's (SSE) chief executive Ian Marchant said earlier this year.

SSE, which is involved in developing the 1.3 billion pounds 504 megawatt Greater Gabbard farm in the North Sea off the coast of East Anglia, said Britain will need about four schemes the size of Gabbard per year if it is to achieve the 2020 target.

"We've made significant progress with a number of key projects in the last six months, but there's still much more to do to hit the 2020 target," an SSE spokesman told Reuters.

Keith Anderson, director of the renewables unit of Scottish Power, part of Iberdrola SA, said the UK urgently needs to modernize its grid to handle the extra wind farms needed.

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Source: Reuters

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