Further written evidence reported to the House
Energy Bill
10:40 am
Sarah Samuel: Just to add to that, we recently did a big report on tidal power and we estimated that there is the potential for 5 per cent. of UK electricity to come from each of tidal-range and tidal-stream sources, so that is up to 10 per cent. of electricity in the longer term.
We are supportive of the banding of the renewables obligation; we think that that will help to develop technologies that are slightly further away from market at the moment, but we recognise that there are difficulties with the RO for very small generators and microgenerators and that an alternative support mechanism might be appropriate for those. Equally there is a package of measures around renewables that needs to be tackled, regarding barriers to smaller generators, network charging arrangements, access to the transmission network, and charging of generators connected to the distribution network. That is something that we feel that Ofgem and the Government need to act on together.