Thursday 22 July 2010

What Can be Done:

a) The UK needs to select and nurture its high-quality research communities and entrepreneurs.

b) Funding must be made available to early stage tech developers that have un surprisingly been left high and dry by the private investment community in this country.

c) The UK government needs to agree to a set of principles and actions that make plain their long-term commitment to the clean energy industry.

d) One of those actions should be to commit the activities of all public sector stakeholders to a single set of forward looking and informed principles that support clean energy development. Such an action will help to clarify the government’s position on the matter and send a clear message of long-term support and transparency to the investment community.

e) The UK should commit to procure low-carbon technologies in a series of programmes that seek to motivate the UK’s entrepreneurs and to incentivise overseas developers to establish operations in the UK.

f) The UK should seek in all it does to build sustainable communities of developers in regions where there is a natural strength based on the areas geography or existing R&D base.

g) We must overhaul our grant and tax incentive programmes so they reflect the real issues facing our technology developers.

h) We must incentivise everyone, from large corporations to the man in the street to install clean energy technologies.

Monday 5 July 2010

Clean Energy Industry - Has the UK Missed the Boat

The following describes the current perception of the UK amongst investors, start-ups and micro-SMEs within and without the UK:

Planning Permission is a lottery, leading to unacceptably damaging delays in the implementation of technology demonstration programmes or product roll-out.

Government support is largely policy rather than legislatively driven leaving investors in an unhelpfully uncertain investment environment.

Feed in and generation tariffs are too small and too exclusive.

Applying for grants is too resource intense leaving many developers with no alternative but to ignore them.

The regional or central sources of grants and incentives are often inappropriate, insufficient and too complex.

So called “Centres of Excellence” are distracted from the core purpose of their existence by the pressure to generate consultancy income, which also leads to the ‘crowding-out’ of local private consultants.

When compared to France, Japan, Germany and the US, UK companies invest less in R&D

So what can we do about it?