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Renewable’s share of energy mix falls in UK
- 14 years ago (2010-06-26)
- David Flin
The UK Government has announced a drop of nearly 7 per cent in the share of electricity generated from renewable sources. Despite a year-on-year increase of nearly a third of onshore wind power generation, the total amount supplied in the first quarter of 2010 as part of all sources fell by 6.6 per cent.
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The large quarterly drop is mainly due to a fall off in the amount of renewable power generated from hydro technologies, which accounted for a 44 per cent decrease.
Coal accounted for 31 per cent of the UK’s energy mix, while gas-sourced electricity was 45 per cent. Nuclear power supplied 16.5 per cent, while renewables provided just 6.2 per cent. However, the figures, which were released as part of the UK’s Department of Energy and Climate Change’s quarterly Energy Statistics, also show that the year-on-year renewable capacity increased by 17 per cent over the last two years to 25,222 GWh.
Other headline figures include:
*Total electricity generation from all renewable sources in 2009 was 25,222 GWh, 17 per cent higher than in 2007. Installed capacity for renewable generation reached 8 GW at the end of 2009, compared with 6.8 GW in 2008.
*Electricity generated from all renewables as a percentage of total UK electricity generation rose to 6.7 per cent in 2009, up from 5.6 per cent in 2008.
*In 2009, the percentage of UK electricity sales from sources eligible for the Renewables Obligation was 6.6 per cent, up from 5.3 per cent in 2008.
*Generation from all biomass sources grew by 14.5 per cent. Within this total, landfill gas, which comprises 47 per cent of biomass generation, increased by 4 per cent. Total biomass generation accounted for 34 per cent of all renewable electricity generation in 2009.
On the basis being used to measure progress towards the 2008 Renewable Energy Directive, which requires that the UK obtains 15 per cent of its final energy consumption from renewable sources by 2020, the percentage in 2009 reached 3.0 per cent, up from 2.4 per cent in 2008 and 1.8 per cent in 2007.