The UK government has made no commitment to deal with falling investment in the clean energy sector in its response to an Environmental Audit Committee report on green finance that flagged up the issue.
There is also no commitment to publish a delivery plan to meet its fourth and fifth carbon budgets in full, the committee said after publishing the government’s responses to a EAC report issued in May.
The report had warned that clean power investment fell 56% last year and is now at its lowest level since 2008.
Environmental Audit Committee chair Mary Creagh said: “The government is coasting on climate change. It is currently relying on past successes to scrape by on its carbon budgets and is not even on track to meet them in full.
“We have made progress in clean energy over the last decade, but there has been an alarming collapse in investment in the last year. Meanwhile, little is being done to channel clean investment into areas like transport, industry and heating where emissions need to be cut in the coming years.”
Renewable Energy Association head of policy and external affairs James Court said: “The conversation around transitioning to a subsidy-free environment for many renewable technologies was inevitable and shows how far the sector has come, but the way it has been handled by government has resulted in precipitous changes that have undermined our achievements in solar, onshore wind, renewable fuels, and beyond.
“The industry is now keen to engage with government on how the cheapest forms of new power generation – wind and solar – could be deployed in this new policy landscape.
“Supporting small scale renewable power after the looming closure of the feed-in tariff, and discussing the decarbonisation of heat once the programme to support new renewable heat deployment closes in 2021, are also core industry priorities.”
Image: Wikimedia Commons
UK ‘failing on green finance’
By EBS