UK risks EU fines after losing control of the rudder on renewable energy targets
The UK will miss its renewable energy target by 25 per cent, according to a leaked government letter.
Energy secretary Amber Rudd said the UK was unlikely to hit its target of having 15 per cent of the nation’s energy come from renewable sources by 2020.
“The absence of a credible plan to meet the target carries the risk of successful judicial review, and failing to meet the overall target in 2020 could lead to on-going fines imposed by the EU Court of Justice (which could take into account avoided costs) until the UK reaches the target level,” she warned in a letter leaked to the Ecologist.
While the country is meeting its intermediate targets, it is likely to begin missing them from 2018 onwards. And it's not just Britain that could be in trouble.
“My officials have identified that Germany, France, Poland, Spain, the Netherlands and Ireland are currently off track to meet the target to varying degrees,” Rudd writes, after explaining that Britain will miss its 2020 target by around a quarter.
A spokesperson for the Department for Energy and Climate Change said:
We do not comment on leaked documents. As the Secretary of State has set out clearly in the House, renewables made up almost 20 per cent of our electricity generation in 2014 and there is a strong pipeline to deliver our ambition of reaching 30 per cent by 2020. We continue to make progress to meet our overall renewable energy target.