The UK clean energy targets will be missed without £48 billion

The UK has set a hard target of 100% green electricity by 2030, but unfortunately, at the current time, its investments are not keeping up with its targets.

It is estimated that the UK need £48 billion to get to this target in time. This target would require a doubling of the onshore wind capacity, a tripling of solar power and a quadrupling of offshore wind capacity.

The current thinking, is that the UK is just half way to the wind energy target in 2030, however with solar it is worse. Currently we have roughly 15GW installed capacity, but it is predicted that we need 70GW to meet our target. Current progress suggests that we will hit 44% renewable by then, which is far short of the 69% that would be required.

What is worse, is that at this rate, gas will still account for 29% of energy which would be more than the individual contribution of Solar, onshore wind or offshore wind. It should be noted, that it is thought that meeting this target on time, will be worth far more in savings, but there does not seem to be enough urgency from the UK government to push this forwards.

It should be noted, that we have just had a change of government, and if Labour continues as it has started, we should get back on track.

In the summer, a government report found that the policies put in place by Rishi Sunak were only good enough to meet roughly 1/3 of the carbon reduction that we had pledged to make in the Paris climate agreement of 68%.

Renewable energy could save more than $160 trillion in costs by 2050

There has been a constant argument that the cost of moving to renewable energy is too high. However, it is becoming clearer and clearer. Our descendants will quite rightly have a very low level of respect for us.

The idea of saving a small amount of investment now, and not worry about the trillions that this will cost in the future is quite disgusting. What is more foolish, is that while many of these clean technologies do cost now, they will save far more money in the future.

Throughout human history, the human race has fought to leave a better life for their children. Are we seriously saying that we are the first generation who is going to say we don’t care if we make life harder?

IRENA did the analysis, and the found that while global energy demands are likely to double by 2050, 86% of the 2050 demands could be met from renewable energy. The majority of this increase could be met through wind and solar. However, progress is not constant; Trumps foolish solar tariffs the USA lost 20,000 solar energy jobs – talk about America first!

The faster the transition, the greater the impact on the climate change fight. We dont just need to clean up our act, we are going to have to deal with all the damage from the last 2 centuries, and the quicker we make the change, the less clean up we will have to do.

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