offshore wind

"Can the UK run on renewable energy, and how long will it take us to get there?"

Here at Greenpeace those are two questions we get asked a lot, so today we're pleased to say we took a big step toward answering them.

Hot on the heels of Germany’s ambitious renewable energy plans, the Danish government went even further and announced last week that they plan to get half of their country’s total electricity requirement from renewable sources by 2020 and 100% of total energy, including electricity, heating, industry and transport, by 2050.

Great news - Britain's wind farms generated record levels of power on Monday, providing 5 per cent of all power supplied to the National Grid over the course of the day.

The Grid confirmed that 40.5GWh out of a total 809.5GWh was provided by wind farms over the 24-hour period, with wind output peaking at 1,860 megawatts at 8.30pm.

A National Grid spokesperson said that, including direct output from turbines not conected to the grid, "about 10 per cent of total electricity demand would have been met by wind power. It is a pretty big landmark for the industry."

Wind power in the UK has just been given a massive shot in the arm with several large-scale new offshore projects in the pipeline. The Crown Estate - which is the lucky owner of the seabed around the British Isles - is awarding contracts for a vast programme of wind farm construction which will significantly improve our renewable energy capacity, not to mention creating thousands of jobs.

Ok, ok, I know there've been some unflattering things said about E.ON on these pages in the recent past, but that's just us trying to helpfully point them away from their dependence on dirty fuels towards the sunlit uplands of clean, green energy sources. And it doesn't mean that we can't praise them when they get something right, as they've done today in announcing the start of work on the long delayed London Array.

Offshore wind - 3,500 new turbines by 2020?

Although the PM has taken a few verbal pastings from us over the past few months on key climate issues like airport expansion and new coal-fired power stations, in a new speech today he did much to redeem himself by announcing an ambitious plan to ensure Britain generates 15 per cent of its energy from renewable sources by 2020.

To be sure, the government has promised as much in the past and failed to deliver, but there seemed to be something different about today's Renewable Energy Strategy Consultation - some meat on the bones which indicated that the plan might just be more than empty rhetoric. The government is consulting on ambitious plans designed to allow the UK to meet its share of an overall EU target to generate 20 per cent of energy (electricity, heat and transport) from renewables within 12 years.

'Wind Power in the UK', a report from the Sustainable Development Commission (SDC), confirms that a rapid expansion of UK wind energy is essential to reduce carbon emissions and thereby minimise the potentially catastrophic impacts of climate change.