The UK have had big plans before, though not this big – what we’ve always been missing is the guts to make them happen, to drive the change needed. That’s why we’ve missed targets before and why we’ll miss them again. Talk is one thing (and we’ve had plenty of it, low carbon economy this, climate change biggest threat that……. and so on) what we need is action.

Offshore costs twice as much to generate from so unless huge sums of public money are being set aside – it won’t happen. And onshore is blocked by the planning system and unless the government intends to get to grips with this simple reality – again it won’t happen.

The biggest potential we have comes from onshore wind, yet two thirds of all wind projects are refused by District Councils at the planning stage, and two thirds are upheld by the government at appeal – a lot of bad decisions being overturned, eventually.

It usually takes between three to five years, costs an awful lot of time and money just to get a simple decision. Wind is our big opportunity – it’s our new North Sea Oil. We’ve enough to run the country three or four times over and it’s stuck in a planning system that’s not fit for purpose and wasn’t designed for it.

Went on Radio 4’s PM show last week to bring this up with Adair Turner. Not often you get to put the questions direct to those who have the power to change the situation. Here’s hoping Brown et al actually achieve something this time …

It’s not un-common to hear people say ‘We need Feed in Tariffs in the UK, like they have in Germany – they’ve got umpteen Gigawatts of renewables from it’. And fair enough they do. It’s important not to confuse large scale FITs with micro though.

The problem for onshore wind (large scale) in the UK is planning not financial and therefore FITs just can’t help. We need German planning laws to emulate German success, in large scale wind.

But what about micro generation; Are feed in tariffs the answer to better deliver this?

Planning used to be a barrier to micro generation but no longer. The problem is just that the numbers don’t stack up. It’s a financial problem, the territory of FITs.

German FITs pay well for micro generation – more than 30p per unit. No wonder much more gets built there than here with our 10p or so. That’s how it works. It’s nothing to do with it being an easy system to use or anything else, just much more money.

But multiple ROCs would do the same job here. They recently doubled and it would be easy enough to have them quadruple (to emulate the value of German FITs) – much easier than to set up a new scheme. And here’s why.

Export from home generation cannot be economically metered, so the ‘system’ cannot attribute it to individual suppliers, it just reduces grid losses. FITs require an electricity distribution company to pay for the power, one who operates the grid – and who then passes on the cost to electricity suppliers working in that region. That’s how it works in Germany. It would be complex to set up and run – compared to multiple ROCs. And it would require new legislation, no small issue.

And would FITs for micro generation give us shed loads of renewables, like Germany? Well yes and no – it would be a boost, but let’s not overestimate how much they have in Germany – from micro gen. Germany’s incredible 12% renewables contribution is often described as coming from ‘wind and solar’ – giving the impression that solar (micro generation) plays a large part. It doesn’t.

Solar actually makes up 0.3% of Germany’s electricity – wind and other large scale renewables produce 11.7%. Put another way micro generation makes up just 4% of the electricity supported under FITs in Germany. It’s good but not as good as it’s cracked up to be.

FITs are good at stimulating micro generation simply because they pay well. Money is really what stimulates micro generation. FITs are a mechanism that works in Germany to provide that money, they could be made to work here but not easily. Whereas multiple ROCs could readily do the same job. The system and the legislation is in place and it works in a UK market context. There’s nothing clever about FITs, they just pay well. That’s easy to emulate. You’d think.

Our German friends do have something we lack – commitment to renewables. That’s what we need. German style commitment to Planning for large wind that works and Finance for micro generation that works.

The reason for the delay from consent to construction is well known in the industry. And it’s still the planning system, in this case the way it deals with the discharge of planning conditions – of which wind farms have many. It can take years to clear these conditions and it has to be done before building. That’s mostly why, of 2.5 GW right now, less than 40% is under construction.

Stats confirmed here for anyone interested: http://www.bwea.com/statistics/

Two facts to support my argument about planning: two thirds of all wind projects are refused by District Councils at the planning stage, and two thirds of all appeals are upheld by the government – a lot of bad decisions being overturned, eventually.

And wind energy is the only major generation source that depends for planning on District Councils – the government deals with all others for very good reasons. District councils are not up to the job, on the whole.

If offshore wind had onshore economics and/or onshore wind had offshore planning, we’d be well away. Bolstering offshore will cost hundreds of Millions, bolstering onshore will take some political courage, to give it a planning system fit for purpose. We could spend those hundreds of millions in far more effective ways.

We talked about the 1,000 homes the turbine can power every year and other bits and pieces, how often it doesn’t work (mere days per year) how much time we spend on maintenance (two days per year), that kind of stuff – a brief exploration of the myths of wind energy I guess. The lack of noise was one thing he remarked on, from the turbine I mean, the M4 is just awful there.

I took him into the machine itself – followed every step of the way by photographers and film crews and I could see he was so very used to that, his face and his body language were always just right (not like mine). This is no criticism just an observation, he’s always on camera after all. Hey maybe I should have had a shave…. Nah.

We talked briefly about the Tories idea to introduce Feed-in Tariffs to the UK – as an answer to the lack of Renewable Energy progress we’re all making. It’s the second time this week I’ve been asked how I think this might work (or not), the Guardian also asked, so I’m going to write a short piece on it – and blog it.

Basically I think it’s the right answer to the wrong question, but more later.

I mentioned (I just had to), more than once but always in context… , that planning was actually the only real problem for onshore wind – the only thing standing in the way of us hitting our targets. And I pointed out the anomaly that wind is the only major generating source whose planning decisions are made by District Councils. Oil, Gas, Coal and Nuclear decisions are made elsewhere, with a different outcome.

It’s easy enough to see how wind got to be in that situation, the planning system being designed for bigger concentrations of power before wind came along with its decentralised smaller scale nature – but it’s hard to see why wind has been left in this situation for so long. Except for the fact that it would take guts to change the system in the face of the hysterical NIMBY mob….

Don’t think I made any headway with that one – no politicians in the UK have the guts to tackle it in my opinion, but I don’t stop trying.

On Feed in Tariffs though, I detected an interest in what I had to say. Hope so it would be a bad policy for us all – you can read more on why in this post.

Anyway, nice enough half hour spent with the man that might be our next prime minister. I quite liked him.