Microgeneration: key to zero-carbon buildings?

Businesses looking to go green and cut their power bills are starting to turn to small-scale renewable energy technologies such as on-site wind turbines or solar panel arrays. These microgeneration projects are an essential step towards producing zero-carbon buildings and will help the government meet its aim of cutting emissions by 60 per cent by 2050. But without guarantees of decent money for small-scale producers, campaigners believe that microgeneration will struggle to make a mainstream impact.

According to this year's Budget report, all new business buildings need to be zero-carbon from 2019. The government is also trying to encourage owners of older buildings to install microgeneration plants to cut their impact on the environment, and has said that it will not change the business rate band that the building falls into despite earlier fears that it would.

Microgeneration also forms a key part of the London Mayor's 2007 Climate Change Action Plan. It wants to get a quarter of London's energy off the grid and into microgeneration by 2025. Whether these targets will remain in place with new mayor Boris in City Hall, however, is still to be seen.

Some progress is already being made by businesses in microgeneration. Ford is planning to add a third wind turbine with a 1.8-megawatt capacity in its plant at Dagenham to ensure that it remains 100 per cent wind-powered following the installation of a new engine line. And not too far away from SmartPlanet Towers, BT plans to erect two small 6-kilowatt wind turbines and a 15-kilowatt solar panel array on its Colombo House building in Southwark, London, which it says will give it some idea of the viability of microgeneration in highly built-up urban areas.

But much more could be done to encourage businesses and householders to install microgeneration plants. Germany, for example, has 200 times more installed solar power capacity than the UK. The reason for this disparity is quite simple, say campaigners -- it uses a feed-in tariff (FIT), which guarantees that microproducers of renewable energy get a premium price for any excess energy that they sell back to grid.

FIT is successful because it gives consumers and businesses a guaranteed income and an incentive to produce renewable energy. In the UK, by contrast, the wholesale market is dominated by the large power generators, leaving businesses and householders at the mercy of free-market prices.

The government currently relies on its Low Carbon Buildings Programme (LCBP) to fund microgeneration projects for businesses and homeowners. However, the LCBP is woefully underfunded and has overseen an overall drop in the rate of renewables installations. The Friends of the Earth says that for the programme to work it needs to have at least ten times more funding and be backed up by a commitment to FIT.

Although the Budget said that the government will look at the potential of FIT in the summer, MPs recently missed a chance to grasp the nettle early by turning down an amendment to the Energy Bill backing it. But still, it appears that support for FIT is growing. The Conservative party has made feed-in tariffs part of its energy policy, and even energy company Centrica says that Britain needs to change its regulatory environment to encourage microgeneration.

We hope that the government eventually agrees.

Related Links

• SmartPlanet