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Green targets will add £80 a year to domestic energy bills, says Lords committee
Meeting government targets to generate one-third of electricity from renewable sources by 2020 could increase electricity prices by 38 per cent, a Lords committee has concluded.
The figure was revealed in a report, The Economics of Renewable Energy, by the cross-party House of Lords Economics Affairs Committee. It said the annual cost of increasing renewable generation from 6 to 34 per cent, including balancing and grid costs, would be £6.8 billion, or £80 for the average household. It said the government should include that increase when developing policies on fuel poverty.
The committee recognised that the government was committed to the target but said that most of the evidence it had heard cast doubt on whether it would be feasible, especially because renewable energy growth had to proceed in parallel with a replacement programme for conventional and nuclear plant. Peers said the renewable energy target would "effectively double" the amount of new electricity generating capacity that had to be installed by 2020 because 14-19GW of new fossil fuel and nuclear capacity would also be required.
To reduce the costs of intermittency, government should urgently encourage research into storage technologies, peers said, adding that the storage potential of renewable heat meant government should "lay at least as much emphasis" on it as on electricity.
Peers dismissed plans in the current Energy Bill for feed-in tariffs for microgeneration of electricity, saying the returns were "too small and uneconomic" for public support. That support should be switched to domestic heat generation, they said.
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