Gordon Brown has shown his committment to a renewable energy future with an ambitious £100 billion plan.
The money is planned to come from private investment over the next 12 years, with government incentives paving the way to develop and deploy technologies including tidal, solar and wind power.

In the proposal, the country would extend and raise the level of its renewables obligation to encourage up to 30 percent to 35 percent of its electricity to come from renewable sources by 2020.

The country’s Department for Business, Enterprise and Regulatory Reform said this would mean connecting around 30 to 40 gigawatts of additional renewable capacity, with much of it from offshore and onshore wind.

Brown outlined the plan at a Low Carbon Economy Summit in London.

“When I first proposed holding this conference last November the price of oil was $90 a barrel, up from just $60 a barrel the year before,” he said.

“Today it is over $130 a barrel and the resulting energy and fuel price rises, as all of us know, are hurting families and hurting businesses everywhere, and they pose a real risk to the stability and a real risk of imposing damage on the global economy, for every country in the world is now having to face up to the consequences of this global change.”

He said that although his country’s aim must be to get the current high oil price down, he said they need to recognize that they have to take a new course.

“Meeting our climate change goals requires Britain to become a clean economy, that is, to replace many traditional fossil fuels with low carbon sources of energy right across this country, and to do so at much lower levels of energy demand than currently projected,” said the prime minister.

“And we must start now.”

Along with the planned incentives, the government has also published a new package of measures to speed up grid connections for renewable energy projects.