In the next 20 years a substantial amount of the UK’s existing electricity generation capacity will close. How this capacity is replaced will have a major impact on the UK’s ability to meet its international and domestic carbon emissions reduction targets.
To explore this issue WWF-UK and Greenpeace commissioned Pöyry energy consultants to look at the implications for the UK electricity sector of meeting the UK’s share of the EU renewable energy target. This requires the UK to produce 15% of its energy from renewables by 2020.
The report was based on the assumption (supported by government analysis) that there was around 76GW of connected capacity in 2007. Of this, 22.5GW is expected to close by 2020. Pöyry constructed various scenarios of energy demand and renewable energy growth to ascertain whether these technologies would be able to meet the so-called ’energy gap’.
This report is a summary of the report Implications of the UK meeting its 2020 renewable energy targets.
