To little - not to late

I was intrigued by numbers quoted in the Morning Star (online) the other day - so much so that I wanted to share them with you.

It seems that despite fears that the Feed-in tariffs would cause a runaway boom, it's not been the case. It would seem the tariffs have failed to really ignite the renewable energy cause, with installations totally a capacity of just 16 megawatts. A figure we're told that's in line with Government predictions.

To put that figure into perspective, Germany installed six gigawatts of solar energy this year - that's almost 400 times the UK's effort.

The article blames a "towering lack of ambition" on British policy. It cites the first biomethane plant at Didcot which opened recently. Whilst other plants are also being built and nearing completion, the article points out that it would take 200 similar plants to deliver half of the UK's domestic gas supply.

To put that into perspective, Germany has 3,500 biomethane plants already in operation and China has 4,000 city scale plants in addition to 40 million smaller installations.

Read the full report yourself here.

photo credit: emli bendixen