Feed-in tariffs 'will make businesses go green'

Renewable energy has become more attractive to businesses due to the introduction of a feed-in tariff incentive scheme, according to an expert.

Speaking about the new initiative, which rewards companies for using green energy by providing "clean energy cashback", editor of BusinessGreen.com James Murray suggested it will encourage businesses to use renewable energy.

He said: "You are going to start to see businesses … want to cut their carbon emissions because they have realised that [they can] actually … make quite a bit of money [by doing so]."

In a paper published in February by the Department for Energy and Climate Change (DECC), it was reported that feed-in tariffs were designed to give small companies an incentive to use green energy, by providing them with an investment in generating their own low carbon electricity.

According to the DECC, by 2020 the scheme expects to support over 750,000 small scale low carbon electricity installations with the investment of businesses, saving around seven million tonnes of carbon dioxide.

Posted by Joseph Hutton