The impact of policy changes: The opportunities of Community Renewable Energy projects in the UK and the barriers they face
Pegah Mirzania,
Andy Ford,
Deborah Andrews,
George Ofori and
Graeme Maidment
Energy Policy, 2019, vol. 129, issue C, 1282-1296
Abstract:
The UK's energy system is predominantly centralised with a major reliance on fossil fuels. The trilemma of successfully delivering energy security, equity, and environmental sustainability, whilst dealing with an ageing energy infrastructure, demands change within the entire energy system. In recent years, Community Renewable Energy (CRE) projects have played a significant role in the transition of the UK's energy system, but since 2016 government support for them has been less robust. This paper reports a web-based survey and semi-structured interviews of the UK's community energy groups undertaken between August 2016 and March 2017. The results indicate that huge problems have arisen due to the changes in government policy, particularly for solar photovoltaic schemes. The majority of CRE organisations have chosen to focus on managing their existing assets rather than plan further growth. Additionally, this paper highlights the key challenges facing CRE projects that wish to develop innovative business models under the new policy conditions.
Keywords: Community Renewable Energy (CRE); Business model; Feed-in-Tariff (FIT) (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2019
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (38)
Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0301421519301569
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only
Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.
Export reference: BibTeX
RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan)
HTML/Text
Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:enepol:v:129:y:2019:i:c:p:1282-1296
DOI: 10.1016/j.enpol.2019.02.066
Access Statistics for this article
Energy Policy is currently edited by N. France
More articles in Energy Policy from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().