via FT.com

The UK’s plans to ease the building of new wind farms will do little to encourage new turbines to be built to meet the government’s exacting renewable energy targets, according to the renewable energy industry.

The bill currently before parliament is intended to streamline the process of granting planning permission to large wind farm sites by referring them to the UK’s new Independent Planning Commission.

But the British Wind Energy Association told the Financial Times that the measure was “too late, too weak” and aimed at the wrong target.

“The irony is it will not help,” said Gordon Edge, director of economics and markets at the BWEA. “The measures will not be implemented until 2009, it will take a while to get the Commission up and running, and it only applies to large wind farms over 50 megawatts.”

Mr Edge said the combination of these factors would leave a large backlog of proposed wind farms still stuck in the planning system. The BWEA calculates that there are 2.4 gigawatts of wind power capacity in the UK at present, enough to power 1.3m homes. But there is more than 9GW of new capacity stuck in the planning process.

A Financial Times analysis of the wind market has found that large subsidies from the electricity consumer to wind farms were failing to encourage new construction because of planning system delays. Last year, according to the BWEA, just 427MW of generating capacity was built, down from 631MW in 2006.

Most new applications are likely to be for smaller windfarms, Mr Edge says, because so many of the best sites for large farms are already taken up by projects in planning. Proposals for small wind farms are handled by local authorities, however, meaning the government’s proposed new planning commission is unlikely to speed up the planning process.

The UK must expand the proportion of its electricity supply coming from renewables eight-fold by 2020, under proposals by the European Commission, so that it derives 40 per cent of its electricity from renewable sources such as wind.

Wind has seen a surge of investment as one of the most mature and cheapest renewable technologies, but many investors have been frustrated by the planning system.