The incentives offered for the uptake of
renewable energy could improve through government plans to make it more appealing for businesses and individuals in the UK to invest in microgeneration of power.
In an article written for the Independent and republished by the Department of Energy and Climate Change, Vince Cable and Chris Huhne explain that existing incentives are insufficient to make it truly worthwhile for investment into renewable energy to be made on a small scale.
"The current framework clearly isn't working," they write, adding: "The current carbon price, for example, provides a very limp incentive to green investment."
In order to tackle this, the pair propose reforms to the Climate Change Levy which they hope will support the carbon price and provide greater certainty to potential investors.
The upcoming Energy Bill is also due to outline further reforms to the existing framework, which could help to boost the uptake of renewable methods of generation for both home and business energy in the years to come.
Meanwhile, the government continues to do what it can to improve its own practices, having established a desire to be the greenest administration in the history of the UK.
Following the election and the formation of the coalition parliament between the Conservatives and the Liberal Democrats, David Cameron outlined his aim to achieve record-breaking levels of green commitments.
Now, however, the government is asking for more to be done across the EU in the years remaining before 2020, which has been set as the deadline for achieving targets on reductions in carbon dioxide emissions.
Existing targets call for the level of carbon emissions put out by EU member states to be cut by 20 per cent by the time the decade ends.
However, the coalition - and the authors of the Independent article - believe this target should be raised by half, to require a 30 per cent drop in carbon emissions to be achieved across the EU over the next nine and a half years.
