Land Based Renewables
Programme background
By 2020, the proposed EU requirement is that the UK meets 15% of its final energy demand from renewable sources, which equates to around 40% for electricity. There is an urgent research need to understand the environmental implications of this requirement, as the recent controversy over biofuels shows.
The Land Based Renewables programme forms part of the sustainable use of natural resources (SUNR) theme of the NERC strategy. Other programmes within the SUNR theme (eg Marine Renewable Energy) will also help meet this need.
The UK seeks to exploit a finite land area to produce both low-carbon energy (from wind farms and solar power to biofuels) and to absorb carbon emissions via sequestration. At the same time, the urban land area continues to grow (eg London needs 125 times its own area to provide the resources it consumes).
The vision for the 'ecocities' of the future embodies a multitude of microgeneration and shallow subsurface renewable energy technologies whose collective impact on terrestrial and freshwater systems is not known and whose potential for carbon sequestration has not been fully explored.
This programme seeks to forecast the renewables 'energyscape' of the UK using a systems approach that incorporates non-energy land uses in the assessment, and predicts where the greatest (or least-damaging) environmental gains might be.
The science goal is to develop an integrated, quantitative understanding of the consequences of using land for renewable energy production on the resilience of terrestrial and aquatic ecosystems. An exemplar objective is a whole-systems analysis of the use of land for carbon manipulation.
The scope of this research programme activity is designed to cover any mechanism to produce energy (wind, water, bio, at a range of scales from big wind farms to micro-generation, including micro-hydro) that takes place on the land surface (as opposed to the estuarine, coastal or marine environments which are also covered by this theme but explored in separate actions).
The goal is to develop an integrated, quantitative understanding of the consequences of using land for renewable energy production on the resilience of terrestrial and freshwater ecosystems.
The research programme will predict the environmental outcomes of natural resource use for renewable energy, using a systems approach to help deliver the overall goal of the sustainable use of natural resources theme. This will contribute to delivering actions defined under SUNR theme Priority 1: to predict the environmental outcomes of natural resource use for non-renewable and renewable energy using a systems approach.
Up to £2·4m has been invested to date in support of collaborative grants to address this topic, including a financial contribution from Shell UK of £350k. Natural England is contributing support in kind to the research programme, which has included expertise helping define the scope.
The projects that were funded were developed and assessed via a sandpit process that was held in June 2009. Natural England and Shell UK both participated in the sandpit.
About the programme
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