SW renewable resource assessments

Regen SW, with funding support from the Department for Energy and Climate Change (DECC), has produced updated onshore renewable energy resource assessments for the south west. The work has been delivered in support of rapidly evolving national energy policy to enable the south west to be at the forefront of renewable deployment and to harness the local economic opportunities presented through the expanding renewable energy sector.

The south west has already undertaken a significant amount of work to establish renewable energy evidence and targets to support these objectives, based on detailed resource assessments at both regional and local level, through the REvision 2010 and REvision 2020 projects. The work of REvision has been updated under this process in response to subsequent technical resource and technology developments, the UK renewable energy target for 2020 and increasing political ambition for renewable energy deployment both nationally and locally.

Regen is working with a range of partner organisations in the south west including the Environment Agency and local authorities to assess local renewable energy resources to support local sustainable energy evidence planning and decision making. Regen is working with these and other partner organisations to bring together the best possible information within the resource assessments to maximise the use of resources available across the south west.

The resource assessments will provide local authorities with a suite of spatial information about the opportunities for renewable energy generation in their area. They will provide the platform for detailed local studies to examine specific opportunities in more detail and to support the development of sustainable energy policies in the local development framework.

Scope of the resource assessments

The renewable energy resource assessments will be produced as GIS datasets, presented to local authority level where possible, containing:

• wind resources and constraints to development (updated from the REvision 2020 data from GOSW)
• new modelling of microgeneration potential with local authorities including ground source and air source heat pumps, photovoltaic’s (PV), and solar hot water opportunities
• biomass resource and waste arisings (energy crops, forestry, waste wood, agricultural waste, sewage sludge and municipal and commercial organic waste excluding transport biofuels) undertaken in partnership with the Environment Agency
• regional data from the Environment Agency’s hydropower opportunities map cut to local authority level, which Regen SW will ground test and establish guidance to assist assessment of individual hydro opportunities

For information about using the regional resource assessments in local evidence base development visit the Planning for Sustainable Energy toolkit and training pages.

The knowledge and lessons gained by the south west in delivering this work will shape national guidance to other regions to undertake renewable resource assessments.

The outputs of the resourse assessments will be available for local authorities from October 2010. For more information please email Josie Ashe