UK Government Releases Additional £20 million For Clean Energy Technology

Ed Miliband, Energy and Climate Change Secretary for the UK, announced yesterday that the government would release an additional £20 million in funding to be granted to companies developing clean energy technologies.

The UK government funds are venture capital grants which would support the development of current or proposed technologies in sectors like wave, tidal, solar, and wind energy. Fuel cell development has also been benefiting from recent funding increases. The aim of the grants is to boost energy efficiency in all clean renewable energy sectors.

During last year’s recession private funding for early-stage renewable energy technologies took a plunge as the economic climate worsened. Ed Miliband told press that the government would be stepping in where private venture capitalists were no longer able to do so, in order to quickly fill the gap in funding.

The announcement is part of an overall funding scheme which will see a total of £405 million  allocated to companies developing low-carbon technologies for renewable energy. So far, funding has already been granted to the offshore wind energy sector, which has been hit hard by the recession. A total of £120 million has been handed out to offshore wind ventures. An additional £60 million was granted to projects aiming to develop and install tidal and wave energy.

The scheme is part of the UK government’s aggressive new stance to tackle climate change at home, and is also in preparation for the UN climate talks in Copenhagen in December. Other funding which has been released already includes  £21 million to promote low-carbon technologies for UK residents to use in the home.