The UK government’s chief environmental advisor Lord Deben has said that it is “clearly failing” in policy areas relating to energy efficiency.
Speaking to the Observer newspaper this weekend, Deben said that the government had not addressed the waste of energy from homes without proper insulation and had failed to properly stimulate renewable heat technologies using the renewable heat incentive.
While the UK is on target to meet renewable electricity generation targets, renewable energy – including heat and transport – is behind and the UK looks like missing its 2020 target to derive 15% of total energy consumption from renewable sources without policy support.
While the Renewable Heat Incentive has been established to stimulate investment in the area, its efficacy has come under criticism. Degressions, like those felt by solar installers under the feed-in tariff, have continued to reduce subsidies on offer and the Department of Energy and Climate Change admitted in its last statistical release that they were impacting on deployment.
“[Heat] is much the most difficult thing. This is the area we have to get right. We need a mixture of renewable heat initiatives and energy efficiency. You have to get these two together. This is the area we have so far failed in. There is an awful lot of heat going to waste,” Deben said.
“The government admits that the things it has tried have not worked sufficiently. The climate change committee has brought it to their notice and the government is working on trying to produce a different way of achieving this end. There is nothing wrong with failing, but what we have to do is keep our absolute eye on the outcomes,” he added.
Deben’s comments come less than a week after DECC was urged to tighten up energy efficiency policies and learn from previously successful programmes.
