The UK government has published its Clean Power 2030 Action Plan, detailing how it intends to decarbonise the grid by the end of the decade.
Energy Secretary Ed Miliband unveiled the plan, which provides a comprehensive road map for achieving 95% clean energy across the UK by 2030.
The plan confirmed that onshore wind farms will be brought back under the Nationally Significant Infrastructure Project, in line with other parts of the energy infrastructure.
This will make it easier for major onshore wind farms with capacities larger than 100MW to be pushed through.
The public will still be consulted on proposed new developments, but ministers will now have the final say rather than local councils.
Decisions will take national factors into account, including energy security and the need to mitigate climate change.
The plan will also change how the queue of new power grid projects functions, with the government calling the current “first come, first served” system “dysfunctional”.
New grid projects will be assessed and prioritised according to importance
The government said that the projects will be prioritised by order of importance, which will help ensure that the national energy system is based on “what the country needs”.
It will also prioritise projects that are ready to go and are in line with the 2030 target, freeing up space by removing stalled or speculative projects from the queue.
There are currently thousands of projects waiting to be approved – it’s estimated that if every such project was granted approval and added to the grid, it would bring in an additional 739GW of energy.
This is equivalent to around 14 times the total amount of energy from renewable sources across the whole of the UK.
It added that the reforms were expected to unlock £40bn per year of investment into “homegrown clean power projects” and infrastructure, largely from the private sector.
The government said that its plans will help protect consumers from spikes in household energy bills by shifting the UK’s reliance on volatile fossil fuel markets to homegrown renewable.
Miliband said that the government was embarking on “the most ambitious reforms to our energy system in generations”.
He added that the challenge of building a clean power ecosystem was the “national security, economic security, and social justice fight of our time”.
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