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Thank you, Tom.
I am delighted to be able to launch the SUPERGEN initiative today,
and delighted as well to see so many Members of both Houses of
Parliament present. It underlines the importance we all attach to
SUPERGEN. With an investment of over £25m over 5 years in sustainable
power generation, it does have the potential to make a very important
contribution to the achievement of Britain's energy policy goals.
This is an impressive collaborative project, bringing together
academics and researchers with industry and Government. At its heart are
consortia of academic groups working in collaboration with industry
through a cross-disciplinary approach to deliver innovations in
sustainable power generation and supply. I congratulate the EPSRC for
the way SUPERGEN has been developed through the Carbon Trust, ESRC, NERC
and BBSRC, and with those engaged in university research.
Through these research consortia, SUPERGEN can address the larger
challenges of sustainable power generation and supply. The studies will
establish a platform for the development of new methods for efficient
and sustainable power generation and supply. SUPERGEN can bridge the gap
between academic or blue skies research and practical application by
industry to a range of sustainable energy technologies.
I particularly welcome the announcement today that the Carbon Vision
Partnership will be investing up to £6m over the next 4 years in R
& D on the generation and supply of low carbon power. This is
another partnership - between the Carbon Trust and EPSRC. And last year
DTI allocated an additional £4m to facilitate the demonstration of new,
control, storage and metering technologies in addition to existing
funding in these areas. The Department is also planning to fund a centre
of excellence in distributed generation and sustainable networks
involving Strathclyde University and UMIST, which will concentrate on
pre-commercial work and will complement SUPERGEN. I hope the centre will
be established early in the New Year.
Renewable energy is today at the heart of our energy policy. The
Energy White Paper published in February made that clear. We have four
goals for our energy policy:
- To put ourselves on a path to cut the UK's carbon dioxide
emissions by 60% by 2050;
- To maintain the reliability of energy supplies;
- To promote competitive energy markets in the UK and beyond; and
- To ensure that every home is adequately and affordably heated.
Renewable energy contributes to all those objectives, in particular
making a contribution to reducing carbon emissions, but also very
importantly to assuring future security of energy supply, by
diversifying the sources of electricity on which we will be able to
rely. It also creates new businesses and jobs, not only in energy
generation, but in component construction and support services.
I saw a good deal of that the week before last when I spent the whole
week visiting renewable energy developments around the UK and meeting
the people making them happen. I learned for example that Corus now
supplies more steel to the wind energy industry than it does to
shipbuilding. I took a boat from Rhyl a few miles out to our first big
offshore wind farm which will be generating electricity for up to 50,000
homes from later this month. I visited an abandoned fabrication yard at
Kirkcaldy in Fife that has been brought back into use to build one of
the first wave power generation units that will be trailed at our Marine
Test Centre in the Orkneys. I saw one of the first tide power generators
being put through its paces off the coast at Lynmouth in Devon. And I
visited the cluster on the Isle of Wight where 1000 people are employed
in the manufacture of wind turbine blades.
In the White Paper, we confirmed our target of 10% of UK electricity
being supplied from renewable sources by 2010, and set the aspiration to
double this share by 2020. Our main lever is the Renewables Obligation,
under which electricity suppliers are required to supply a specified
proportion of their sales from renewable sources, with the proportion
increasing year on year. In addition, we are spending nearly £350m over
the next four years supporting renewables that are not yet commercially
competitive, and I announced recently capital grants for four more
offshore wind farms.
The 10% target is ambitious. Last year, only 1.7% of the UK's
electricity was from sources eligible for the Renewables Obligation. But
we are committed to doing all we can to meet this target. There has to
be a step change in the rate of progress. The SUPERGEN initiative is one
way to help provide that change.
Let me say just a little on the work of each of the four consortia.
SUPERGEN's marine consortium is increasing the understanding of
electricity generation in the marine environment, and reducing
uncertainty for investors and industry. It will help marine power
generation reach its potential, and help us move from the research and
development phase into commercial application.
Wave and tidal power have huge potential to supply a significant
proportion of our future energy needs, and in turn help meet our
longer-term emissions reduction targets.
We have one of the best marine resources available - the immense wave
power resource alone is estimated to be at least 120 Giga Watts - enough
to meet peak electricity demand twice over. In recognition of that
potential, the Government has put in place a framework of support to
help industry develop technologies that harness the energy of ocean
waves and tidal currents.
We have already seen the deployment of two full scale tidal stream
prototypes - the one I visited at Lynmouth and another in the Shetlands,
and in the coming weeks we expect to see the testing of a full scale
wave energy device at the UK Marine Energy Test Centre at Orkney. That
centre will be invaluable in the research & development and
commercialisation of marine energy devices and will open later this
month. I hope to be able to visit it shortly.
These are just the first projects to reach this stage of development
and there are a number of other developers hot on their heels. In order
that we ensure this early progress is sustained, a further £7 million
has been allocated (subject to state aids approval) over the next 2
years to support development.
I am very interested in SUPERGEN's work on Future Network
Technologies as this addresses an issue key to the development of
renewables. This is how we move from the present electricity networks
that have developed as a result of a system based on a small number of
very large power stations located close to centres of industry, and high
voltage transmission links, to one based on the connection of a large
number of much smaller sustainable generation sources, often located a
long way from centres of population.
The bulk of the increase in renewables in the period to 2010 will be
from wind energy. Electricity from wind power is more intermittent than
power stations that run continuously. This intermittency has
implications for the design and operation of the electricity networks.
As the proportion of intermittent generation increases, the cost of
maintaining stable supplies also increases. These costs need to be
managed and new ways found to minimise them. That is why the DTI
allocated, as I mentioned, an additional £4m last year to facilitate
the demonstration of new control, storage and metering technologies.
The UK Sustainable Hydrogen Energy Consortium under SUPERGEN will
help the UK realise the full potential of hydrogen research activity,
and confront the scientific and economic challenges facing the
implementation of sustainable hydrogen as a primary energy carrier.
By 2020, fuel cells will be playing a greater part in the economy,
particularly for stationary power generation and energy storage for
intermittent renewables.
Since the Energy White Paper, a number of measures have been taken to
promote fuel cells and hydrogen. These included the development of a UK
Fuel Cell Vision and the establishment of Fuel Cells UK. We are keen to
encourage projects that can demonstrate hydrogen production in
combination with other carbon abatement technologies.
These measures are designed to help stimulate the development of a UK
fuel cell industry and to enable industry to gain real operational
experience and generate meaningful data. The emerging UK fuel cell
industry is already part of the global industry despite the fact that
the sector is still largely at the pre-commercial stage.
I was delighted to hear that CERES Power Ltd, a Crawley-based
developer of fuels cells, has just been announced as the winner of the
Carbon Trust's National Innovation Award.
While biomass, unlike some other forms of renewables, has the
attraction of providing continuous output once a robust fuel supply
infrastructure is in place, I recognise that that developers have so far
experienced real problems in developing fuel supply chains.
The Biomass, Biofuels and Energy Crops Consortium - the fourth of the
four SUPERGEN consortia - by undertaking research into the difficult
issue of the bio-energy supply chain are building bridges between the
emerging bio-energy industry and academic research to encourage
commercial exploitation. In this way, the potential of biomass and
biofuels to provide a flexible, secure form of renewable energy can be
realised. Again, like fuel cells and marine technologies, its major
contribution is likely to come in the decades after 2010.
We are providing support in the order of £100m for bionergy, through
schemes including the Bioenergy Capital Grants Scheme, Clear Skies and
the Scottish Community Renewables Initiative. In addition, the proposals
to change the rules on co-firing of biomass in our current consultation
paper on the technical review of the Renewables Obligation have been
proposed to help address the problem of encouraging energy crops by
giving more time for the crops to be planted.
Innovation is key to our economic prosperity and R&D plays a
central role in the innovation process. We shall shortly be publishing
the results of our innovation review at the DTI and renewable energy
will be an important theme. To achieve the objectives we have set in the
White Paper, and in particular, the targets for renewable energy, we
need to be working effectively together and I warmly welcome the
contribution that I am very confident SUPERGEN will be making.
Thank you.
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