Analysis undertaken for the Renewable Energy Strategy (RES) consultation document suggested that to meet our 2020 target, we may need about a quarter of the UK’s renewable energy to come from biomass-fuelled heat and electricity. A range of biomass sources will be required, including purpose-grown energy crops, wood, and organic wastes such as wood and food waste, manure and slurry. The RES consultation document referred to a previous estimate that there is potential to plant an additional 350,000 hectares of energy crops across the UK by 2020. An updated analysis will be published in the UK Renewable Energy Strategy, which is due in the summer.
In their consultation on a Renewable Energy Strategy, Government published figures estimating the long term technical potential of sustainable biomass sourced in the UK for heat and electricity to be 100 TWh of primary energy per year. This would be sufficient to meet our modelled bioenergy requirement in 2020 but we recognise that, as occurs today, it is likely that we will make use of a mix of domestic and imported products.
We are in the process of furthering our understanding of how the biomass market within the UK may develop and intend to use this information to inform development of the Renewable Energy Strategy. We will, of course, publish our findings.
The 2008 UK Renewable Energy Strategy consultation document set out scenarios for deployment of renewable energy needed to meet the UK’s share of the EU renewable energy target. In one scenario presented in the consultation, the shares of technologies were: 13 per cent. renewable energy from onshore wind, 19 per cent. from offshore wind, at least 5 per cent. from biogas heat and 3-4 per cent. from marine power sources.