Just after the Easter break, the Department for Energy and Climate Change released their statistics for how the renewables industry got on in 2012. Here at Good Energy we decided to have had a good gander to see how the sector performed in comparison to 2012 and for any clues as to how things are shaping up in 2013.
The good news is that it is a strong set of figures. The headline numbers are that renewables’ share of electricity generation was a record 11.3% in 2012, an increase on the 9.4% recorded in 2011. That might not sounds like a big increase, but renewable electricity generation was 41.4TWh in 2012, an uplift of 20% on the 34.4TWh in 2011. Renewable electricity capacity was 15.5GW at the end of 2012, a 26% increase on the previous year. It’s clearly a strong set of figures, showing that the renewables sector in the UK has broken new ground.
Digging further there is some really interesting information on where the gains are coming from. The largest increase in generation was from offshore wind, which rose from 5.1 TWh in 2011 to 7.5 TWh in 2012, representing a huge 40% increase. Onshore wind generation also increased, from 10.4TWh to 11.9 TWh, a 15% increase. Bioenergy increased by 17%. Solar capacity increased from 1.0TWh to 1.7TWh, an increase of 70%.
Hydro generation did see a fall of 8.1% on 2011 as rainfall levels in 2012 were 24% lower than those of 2011, which were the highest in last decade. It’s expected that this figure will improve in the future though, as Glendoe, the UK’s newest, and second largest, hydro station will be coming online again after closure for three years. In to the future, we would expect the installation of Solar PV to move to a more sustainable rate given the effect of the changes to the Feed-in Tariff.
We hope that 2013 will be another record breaking year for renewables though because wind speeds were on average lower in 2012 than in 2011. Similarly, should 2013 be a sunnier year than 2012 then large year-on-year gains might be expected because of the increases seen in installed capacity.
These are strong numbers and there is much progress here to be pleased about. Though, these gains need to be kept in comparison with our European neighbours, Germany, Denmark and Spain are currently leading the charge on renewables. We in the UK are forging ahead but do seem to lag slightly behind the progress made elsewhere in Europe.
Given the place of renewables in diversity of the UK’s energy mix it is of no doubt that 2013 remains a crucial year in the development of renewables.
What the statistics do make clear is that investment in renewables pays off, Our country’s energy demand rose in 2012 and our production of brown energy sources fell. In these circumstances, renewables make economic sense, we hope this is the message the Department for Energy and Climate Change takes from its own statistics and the message that spreads around the corridors of power in Whitehall.
