Question

To ask the Secretary of State for Energy and Climate Change, what recent projections her Department has made of the (a) total installed capacity and (b) generation output of each renewable heat technology in 2020-21.

The Department has made projections for the renewable heat generation of renewable heat installations under the Renewable Heat Incentive (RHI), the main scheme of our heat strategy. Projections to the end of 2015/16 can be found in the Impact Assessment for the RHI, which is quoted below.

Detailed projections do not go beyond 2015/16 because this is the end of agreed RHI budget; and so policy beyond that period is subject to future budget arrangements. The Department’s projections only cover the generation projected from deployment under the RHI. The Department does not hold projections for the market beyond the RHI.

The Department has not published projections for the total capacity (by technology) under the RHI, as, due to the highly variable use patterns (known as load factors) of heating technologies, capacity is not a very useful metric. Instead, we consider generation per year, which is also the unit that we report against the target set by the EU Renewable Energy Directive (RED).

Renewable heat projections under RHI (GWh)

Source: Table 8, RHI Tariff Review, Scheme Extensions and Budget Management (24/09/2013).

The table uses the Low and Central scenarios for Market-Intelligence based projections of potential deployment, spend and installation numbers under the RHI (MI). Non-domestic projections are split by technology; domestic technologies are aggregated.