An interim resource assessment of UK renewable energy technologies

This paper reviews the basic resource-cost estimates previously published in Energy Paper 62 for renewable energy technologies and assesses the implications of the Non-Fossil Fuel Obligation (NFFO) for those estimates. More recent work on evaluating the resource-cost characteristics of Energy Crops, Onshore Wind and Agriculture and Forestry Waste is presented and the uncertainties in estimating future resource-cost data are discussed. The main-changes from the resource-cost estimates presented in Energy Paper 62 are: a reduction in the overall resource for Energy Crops arising out of a re-evaluation of the amount of land likely to become surplus to requirements for food production; a reduction in the overall resource for Onshore Wind arising out of the effect of possible grid limitations on exploitation of the resource in Scotland and Northern Ireland as well as (for 2005 only) a revised build rate; an increase in the overall resource for Agricultural and Forestry Wastes arising out of a re-evaluation of basic assumptions. (author)