UK green energy market gets £90m investment

Privilege Finance has announced £90 million of investments into 14MW of new green energy projects for 2019, enough to power roughly 28,000 homes.

Once construction completes and operation reaches full capacity, these new plants will convert 175,000 tonnes of food waste, which would otherwise end up in landfills, and agricultural waste into green gas for the National Grid.

Chris Winward, Privilege’s commercial director, explained that the recent acceleration in investment is linked to the government’s renewable heat incentive (RHI): “Developers had been waiting to see if the RHI would be guaranteed, so there’s been a surge of new projects since the decision to restore tariff guarantee to December 2016 levels. These projects are now required to be built and injecting gas into the grid by January 2021.

“As current legislation means that the RHI tariff guarantee will eventually be phased out, we’re ensuring future sustainability for the AD (anaerobic digestion) sector by moving beyond tariffs and looking for innovative projects that will generate income through alternative means, such as gate fees.”

The RHI is a tariff scheme to promote the use of renewable heat, offering quarterly payments for seven years in accordance with the amount of green, renewable heat a system produces, with the majority going towards biomethane projects.

Last March, Energy UK called for a wholesale review of the scheme and the rest of the government’s low carbon heat initiatives. Two months after, the Public Accounts Committee reported that it failed to provide value for money.

In April of this year, the Renewable Energy Association sounded the alarm over application delays.At the start of the month, the government announced the extension of the application deadline from 31 January 2020 to 31 January 2021.