Connecting the Future - Greenpeace UK

Connecting the future: the UK’s renewable energy strategy
Broader system issues
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to engage directly in debates about national policy in response to specific
proposals, including the prospect of new coal and nuclear plants as well as large
renewable energy projects.
In addition, the new arrangements do not cover onshore developments under
50MW or offshore projects over 100MW. Ministers will have some discretion
as to how they approach smaller projects, allowing them to fall under the new
major infrastructure arrangements if they are seen as of national significance,
and a new Planning Policy Statement covering these smaller projects should
be published for consultation later in 2008. However, until that new planning
policy statement comes in to force, there is a risk that projects between the
upper limit of microgeneration and the lower limit of major infrastructure
may not benefit from the new planning arrangements. This risk is of particular
importance for renewables projects, many of which are below 50MW (although
in the case of onshore wind, recent proposals have tended to be larger in scale
than earlier projects and the new arrangements in the Planning for a Sustainable
Future White Paper may well encourage this trend).
The proposed changes to the planning regime, then, acknowledge some of
the difficulties that face large energy projects in the current arrangements.
However, the advantages for renewables resulting from these changes in the
planning regime are likely to be limited when compared to the benefits for
conventional technologies for the following reasons:
• The amount of time taken to secure approvals.
• The scale of projects receiving individual approvals.
• The fact that the arrangements will only benefit certain technologies
(small scale wave and tidal power projects will see little benefit from
these proposals).
• The fact that almost half of all renewable energy potential in the UK is
located in Scotland – and therefore under the jurisdiction of the Scottish
Executive’s planning laws.
5.2 Infrastructure
The problem of existing infrastructure acting as a barrier to new technologies
has been relatively well analysed in the context of the electricity system, where
it is widely accepted that the rules of operation, the design of networks and
the associated style of regulation have in particular discouraged generators
from connecting renewables and small-scale generating projects to distribution
networks (DTI 2001, Distributed Generation Co-ordinating Group 2005). In
part these problems arise from the historic design of the electricity system:
increasingly centralised generation has led to a greater reliance on transporting
electricity through the high-voltage transmission network, while the
lower-voltage distribution networks have become increasingly passive,
required only to shift the electricity from the transmission network to the