At first reading, the Committee on Climate Change's renewable energy review (Report, 9 May) appears remarkably complimentary to the engineering community. It identifies the key deployment barriers to rebuilding our energy supply infrastructure as finance and planning, not whether the technology will work or industry can deliver. Yet a more thorough reading suggests it has glossed over these vital questions. Experts at the Institution of Engineering and Technology find the report lacks rigorous analysis of many technical issues essential to meeting UK renewable energy targets.
What is missing is recognition of the scale of technical challenges involved in decarbonising Britain's energy supply infrastructure. The fourth carbon budget said that 60% of new cars should be electric by 2030, a figure far higher than industry's most optimistic projections. The document also planned for gas boilers to be replaced by heat pumps in 25% of houses in the same time. These represent huge engineering programmes where the solutions have to be tailored to households and geographical areas.
We also need to rebuild our electricity generation and transmission infrastructure, subject of the CCC's December 2010 report. In the next 20 years, the coal-fired power stations, which provided more than half our electricity last winter, will be closed. All but one of the existing nuclear stations will expire. The CCC's plans say that, by 2030, renewable energy should supply 45% of our needs, compared with 3% today. Given that energy infrastructure is designed for a life of 30 plus years, this is a massive engineering challenge. We have not run large fleets of offshore wind turbines long enough to understand maintenance needs; our experience of wave energy is restricted to a few prototypes; carbon capture has, so far, been limited to a few megawatt prototypes, not the tens of gigawatts that will be required. The CCC should be more upfront about the challenges it is creating.