Latest News - Energy 2020 Summit launches Action Plan: industry bodies point way to sustainable energy economy. MORE INFO...

It is widely recognised that the combined drivers of energy security and climate change mitigation demand major changes to the national and international energy systems.

This project is a collaboration between a wide range of representative organisations and policy leaders to help accelerate the transition to a low carbon energy economy in the UK.

The Energy 2020 Summit

The Energy 2020 partner organisations organised a Summit held on 30th June, 2008 where they unveiled a national action plan to meet the UK’s 2020 energy targets. The Energy 2020 Action Plan, adding to the Manifesto signed by over 20 bodies, calls for radical action to include a holistic policy framework to provide investment signals, including binding milestones.

The RSA in London saw a full house as 70 people participated in the event, and it was blogged live - visit inbalance.wordpress.com to view the results. 

The nine Energy 2020 Action Plan sectoral presentations as a PDF file are available to download here.

The well-received 'Energy 2020 Vision' vignette presented by Philip Wolfe can be read here.

See below for the National Action Plan document itself. Your views are welcome via the comments box underneath.

A national energy action plan

The Summit identified the likely elements of a national sustainable energy action plan. This includes the building blocks necessary to meet the UK’s contribution to the European energy efficiency and renewables targets.

Based on the discussions at the previous summit, it needed to go substantially beyond the traditional energy industry with targeted measures also for:

• Consumers
• The built environment (new-build and existing stock as well as residential and commercial/industrial)
• Transport
• Land and agriculture

The plan also considers the contributions from a wide range of ancillary and infrastructure sectors.

The Energy 2020 National Action Plan is available to download here.

Very Very interesting. A major social opportunity is as usual being higjacked into a commercial programe of even more construction. We need a major Social Change (Matthew Taylor is trying to make it happen). Energy 2020 - Why not one mention of reduction in consumption? I see more and more massive energy consumption on show biz events. Lets promote more chess/ludo/jigsaws/reading and less music festivals. We need to change social habits. Less promotion of shopping, consumption, less advertising. Now we have moving adverts at bus stops. Think what this requires in carbon? Built Environment. Examine a map of south London at 1900. Every main road had a tram service. Each main road served the roads which were similar to a spiders web. No one needed to walk more than 5 minutes to get a tram. That was 107 years ago Why are we still using bricks. 2000 years old system. Baked clay. Massive carbon consumption. New composites could be used. Remember the New Towns movement before WW2. We need a totally new design for towns which recognises the need for far less carbon consumption. This would make CHP far more economic. The local facilities - library/meeting halls/museum/schools/drop in health/local administration etc to be designed as single source building. Too much is being concentrated on how we can maintain our present way of life (expanding GDP and personal wastefullness) and none to changing our way of life. It should be another component of Energy 2020. Can we please begin by re examining where this life of personal consumption is going. Then maybe we can lecture the Chinese on not buying 50 million SUV's.

Planning has to be democratically decided. The present government proposals are taking priority over superior ideas and wasting money and effort. Sunday Times June 8th about Cambridge, P48 Magazine. Their policy changes must be blocked. On energy, I still have not obtained ROCs, despite all the information given to Ofgem. Peter Foreman

As a small manufacturer we installed 120 solar panels and a 2.5 kW wind turbine on our premises in west London. This was funded by ourselves and a 50 % grant for the solar from the energy saving trust. The main problem was with the planning permission from hounslow council.It took muck too long.

I am trying to get 525k of finance to install a 600kw CHP system in Lancashire using woodchip as the renewable fuel source .that is less than £1000 per kw and none of the high street banks are interested(hsbc,hbos,nat west.rbos,barclays. because of the credit crunch. even with personal guarantees and a farm and market hall offered for security. Until banks are forced to lend for renewable energy then these targets will not be achieved