“The quality of future energy will determine the future quality of life of people on this planet.” That’s what Christiana Figueres, the Executive Secretary of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change told the World Energy Congress in South Korea this October. It’s an unequivocal statement that highlights just how important the quest for reliable (and green) energy is to the future of the planet. It also demands swift and decisive action from all governments to ensure energy stability and sustainability – especially from wealthy nations like the UK.

So, what is the UK doing? Well, thanks to the European Union, we have a firm renewable energy target to aim for at least. Under the EU’s Renewable Energy Directive, the UK must produce at least 15 per cent of its energy from renewable sources by 2020, a reduced rate compared to many countries (the overall goal for Europe is 20 per cent), as the country was starting from around just three per cent renewable energy in 2009. (The UK had an interim target of generating 4.04 per cent renewable energy by 2011/12, which provisional figures indicate was narrowly missed, at 3.94 per cent.)

The 15 per cent target is legally binding, and the Department of Energy and Climate Change (DECC) says it has implemented a number of programmes to achieve the milestone while also ensuring energy security and carbon reduction, as well as ‘making the most of the UK’s abundant natural resources’. Steps include: the Renewables Obligation to incentivise large-scale renewable electricity projects; Feed-in Tariffs for small-scale generators; the Renewable Heat Incentive providing funding for up to 20 years; the Renewable Heat Premium Payment for one-off infrastructure loans; the Renewable Energy Roadmap; the Renewable Transport Fuel Obligation; and improvements in grid infrastructure and access so that when all the renewable projects are up and generating energy, it can actually be delivered to consumers.

It sounds like an impressive list of steps, and there’s no doubt that the percentage of energy from renewable sources is on the increase, but critics argue that not all of these achievements are as great as they sound, and that the government needs to improve its approach. I ask Guy Shrubsole, Friends of the Earth’s (FoE) lead energy campaigner, if it looks like we’ll meet that 15 per cent target, and he tells me it “depends on what happens over the next two years”.

Certainly, there are reasons to be concerned, he indicates: “In the last three to four years, there’s been a quite noticeable falling away of investment in renewables – in part because there’s been a hiatus while investors were waiting for the Energy Bill to come through, and in part because there have been a lot of mixed messages of late coming from the Coalition government. A much stronger anti-green message has crept into particularly the Conservative rhetoric.” So, while DECC may be making many of the right noises, the Treasury has been contradictory, promoting shale gas while insisting the UK “will not lead” on renewables: “At the [Autumn] Conservative Party Conference, we had George Osborne saying yet again that we don’t need to be out ahead of anyone else on the green economy, despite the fact that he seemed to be saying we need to be out ahead of everybody else in all areas of innovation”, Shrubsole says, highlighting a “strange” and even "perverse” way of approaching energy. And, even more recently, we had David Cameron demonising ‘green taxes’ as the reason behind soaring energy prices, as opposed to the more likely culprits of rising fossil fuel prices and corporate greed.

It’s not just FoE that finds this contradiction worrying. Earlier this year, a report from think tank Green Alliance warned that innovation in low-carbon technology is ‘faltering’ and that the country risks having to import technology and paying more to decarbonise. Far from green energy being a burden, Green Alliance’s ‘Nurturing UK cleantech enterprise’ indicates that the UK could save up to £160 billion in energy supply costs by 2050, and generate UK-based business activity contributing up to £89 billion to GDP through successful innovation.

And yet the government’s Energy Bill, which is still making its way through Parliament, contains no firm commitment to decarbonise the energy sector. There was, however, a substantial rebellion in the House of Commons over the matter, with the government defeating - by just 23 votes - an amendment calling for a decarbonisation target to be set now rather than in 2016; this October, the House of Lords defeated a similar amendment by an even narrower margin – just 14 votes.

The matter is important because signals from government are key to encouraging investment, Shrubsole notes. “One of the things we would say is competently missing at the moment from the Energy Bill, is a real sense of long-term certainty. So, it mentions the 2020 target, but for many investors it’s more important to have signals beyond 2020, which is now of course just seven years away.”

Government signals aren’t the only thing that will encourage investors to get involved – price, as always, will play a large role in it, and in that respect renewables are an increasingly appealing proposition. Shrubsole brings this up when I ask him what impact shale gas could have on investment in renewables: “I think there’s a lot of danger in diverting attention and investment away from renewables if the government starts to really incentivise shale gas over green energy. But I think investors are also seeing enormous declines in costs of renewables. So, onshore wind and solar in particular have been dropping over the last few years and [onshore wind is] starting to compete with fossil fuels in terms of price parity.” Indeed, a 2011 report by Mott MacDonald for the Committee on Climate Change, ‘Costs of low-carbon generation technologies’, estimated that energy from onshore wind costs £83 per megawatt hour (MWh), while energy from the best hydro power locations came in at £69/MWh, and energy from activated sewerage sludge from anaerobic digestion at just £51/MWh, while nuclear cost £96/MWh. A report the year before by Parsons Brinckerhoff put power from natural gas turbines at £55-110/MWh.

All this doesn’t necessarily help individuals and communities get up and running with their own power, and this is one area where campaigners think the government needs to improve its efforts. Shrubsole cites the “backwards steps” the government has taken over recent years in cutting some feed-in tariffs (and operating illegally at one point by trying to retrospectively apply cuts to solar power), and notes that there’s currently little help for community energy generation. The feed-in tariff is available for installations up to five megawatts, but FoE thinks this should be raised to 20 megawatts.

Countries like Germany have had great success encouraging individuals and communities to get involved with renewables, a technique that can be more financially beneficial as it cuts out the middleman, as well as some profit margins. And yet, here in the UK, the Big Six energy companies dominate even when it comes to renewable energy installations, with just 0.3 per cent of renewable power coming from community groups, according to a recent report by think tank ResPublica. There is some funding available to help community energy groups get off the ground, but critics argue that central and local government could do a lot more to help – on current trends, the sector will provide just 550MW of power by 2020, but this figure could jump to 5.27GW (a fifth of total renewable energy capacity) with ‘leadership and investment’, according to the ResPublica report.

One barrier to this happening, though, is an entrenched Whitehall mentality that “the only way you can really fix the energy system is to build more big plants”, as Shrubsole notes. It’s a stance almost encouraged by the recent scare-mongering reports highlighting the risk of power shortages, and one evidenced by the continued dominance of large power stations even when it comes to renewables. I’m referring, of course, to the slew of giant biomass combustion plants that have been given planning permission – including a 100MW plant in North Blyth and a 150MW E.ON facility in Bristol – and a number of coal-fired power stations (including Drax and Eggborough), that are now converting to run, at least in part, off biomass.

In 2012, plant biomass accounted for 18.3 per cent of renewable energy, and DECC’s ‘Renewables Roadmap’ estimates that by 2020, biomass could potentially provide between 26 and 42 per cent of renewable energy in the UK. To achieve this, government expects to provide a subsidy for biomass of between £442 million and £736 million, but there are worries the government could be too dependent on biomass – and potentially the wrong type of biomass at that. When I ask Kenneth Richter, FoE’s campaigner on biofuels, if the government is relying too much on biomass to meet its targets, he is unequivocal: “Yes, definitely. We have a lot of concerns about being reliant on biomass, specifically because there are huge differences between different types of biomass in terms of the carbon impact that you get. For example, if you use offcuts or forestry residues or certain waste products that have no other uses, then that’s generally a good thing in terms of carbon emissions. But if you go into the forest and cut down a large amount of trees specifically for burning them, then there’s a lot of evidence that the overall impact of that is – or can be – an increase in emissions when compared to fossil fuels.” Indeed, a recent report by FoE, Greenpeace and the RSPB uses government data to show that generating power from typical conifer trees results in 49 per cent more emissions than burning coal because of the time it takes to grow new trees and the reduced rate of carbon sequestration from forests (not to mention potential losses in biodiversity).

And yet, dedicated biomass plants are universally touted as ‘carbon neutral’ and receive the same government subsidy regardless of feedstock – 1.5 Renewable Obligation Certificates (ROCs), rising to two ROCs with combined heat and power (CHP). (Energy-from-waste (EfW) with CHP is currently also counted as renewable energy by the government, and waste combustion accounted for 10.6 per cent of renewable energy in 2012. International definitions of renewable energy sources exclude non-biodegradable sources, which may explain why EfW receives only one ROC.)

This approach to biomass is despite research by DECC itself finding that biomass combustion could result in higher emissions. Richter explains: “DECC, and particularly David McKay the chief scientist at DECC and his team, have done a very detailed study into the emissions from burning biomass and they have basically come to the same conclusion as we have: that there are huge differences depending on what you’re burning with biomass, and that particularly, burning whole trees can be detrimental. Unfortunately, that research hasn’t found its way into policy yet, so there’s a huge gap between DECC’s own scientific research and advice, and the policy.”

In addition to relying too much on biomass, there’s also a risk that we could be relying too much on Scotland to meet our targets. I’ve been referring mainly to the Westminster government’s activities throughout this article, but the government north of the border has more ambitious targets (and resources). The Scottish Government plans to generate the equivalent of 100 per cent of annual electricity consumption and 11 per cent of heat consumption from renewable sources by 2020 (for the record, renewable electricity is easier to come by than renewable heat and transport fuel – in 2012, 11.3 per cent of the UK’s electricity came from renewables, compared to that previously cited figure of four per cent of overall energy). Scotland consumes only around nine per cent of the UK’s energy, but already produces two-thirds as much renewable energy as the rest of the UK combined: excluding offshore generation, Scotland has 4,894 MW of renewable energy in operation, while the rest of the UK has 7,287MW up and running. Scotland is also purported to have 25 per cent of Europe’s tidal potential and 10 per cent of its wave potential, and boasts 25 per cent of Europe’s offshore wind resources.

When I half-jokingly ask Shrubsole if the no-longer-United Kingdom would be able to meet its renewable targets if Scotland votes for independence next year, he laughs and highlights the enormous potential for more off- and onshore wind farms in the rest of the UK, before concluding: “There seems to be an extremely good expansion of renewables and real political commitment to developing renewables in Scotland, which is sometimes lacking in Westminster, but I think that the whole of the UK needs to get its act together – we need to get going in England, Wales and Northern Ireland to develop our renewables as well.”