An Irish renewable energy company called Mainstream Renewable Power has announced it is to begin work on eight new solar and wind projects to the tune of €3.1bn in four continents.

Headed by Eddie O’Connor, the company will begin work on the eight utility-scale projects which are to reach financial close and begin construction works later this year.

The company is one of the largest suppliers of renewable energy in the world, already providing 19GW of energy, and plans to add another 1,000MW with the new project.

As part of its plans, Mainstream Renewable Power intends to create new plants in Chile, Canada, Scotland, and South Africa, where it has already established significant projects to date.

The largest of the eight new projects will be established in Scotland, with a 450MW wind farm off the coast of Fife that is expected to start generating renewable electricity from 2017.

Three further projects with a combined capacity of 360MW will begin construction this year in a partnership with Globeleq, one of Africa’s largest energy companies.

O’Connor said the company is entering a very intensive growth phase.

“To put this into context, we are about to start building more megawatts than ESB ever put into construction in Ireland in a single year,” O’Connor said. “We put almost 300 megawatts into construction last year and we have an even larger portfolio of late-stage projects ready to go into construction next year.”

Mainstream Renewable Power has previously worked with the Irish and UK governments as part of the Energy Bridge project launched in 2008, which exports off-shore and on-shore energy from Ireland to the UK.

The UK is lagging behind other European nations by not using the £60bn it is expected to collect from European carbon taxes over the next fifteen years to insulate homes, a report has concluded.

The report by campaign group Energy Bill Revolution, which includes contractors Mark Group, Gentoo and trade body the Federation of Master Builders, said redirecting carbon tax cash into insulating homes would deliver substantial improvements to the housing stock.

The government collects two major carbon taxes, the European Emissions Trading Scheme -whereby companies buy allowances from the government for the carbon they emit – and the Carbon Floor Price, which is a tax on carbon intensive industries.

The report found that nine other European countries, including Germany, France and Lithuania, have so far committed to use the revenues from the schemes to fund energy efficiency programmes, but the UK has not.

It said the Treasury was expected to raise £60bn in tax from the two schemes over the next fifteen years.

It said: “The Treasury has opposed carbon tax recycling mostly because it reduces the department’s control over public spending and over other departments.

“But the Treasury announced last year that both carbon taxes from the Emissions Trading Scheme and Carbon Floor Price were classified as ‘green taxes’, which means that their principal objective is officially to help protect the environment.

“Despite this they still refuse to recycle them to reduce carbon emissions.”

The report added that using the taxes to fund energy efficiency would provide a “stable and predictable revenue stream for a long term infrastructure programme to make homes highly energy efficienct”.

The report pointed out that the proceeds from other similar taxes, such as the landfill tax, were earmarked for environmental causes.

Ed Matthew, director of the Energy Bill Revolution, said “When will they [the Treasury] understand that this is not their tax revenue.

“It belongs to the people and we want it back to warm up our homes.

“Using carbon tax to make households more energy efficient is by far the best long term solution to both bring down energy bills and end fuel poverty.”

A spokesperson for the Department of Energy and Climate Change said: “It has been the view of successive UK governments that spending priorities should not, in general, be determined by the way in which revenue is raised as this is an inefficient means of allocating public funds.”

Tidal Lagoon Power is seeking approval for a £12bn project to develop a series of tidal energy plants in the UK that is claimed to be the world’s first tidal lagoon power plant.

The company has submitted an application, following three years of feasibility work and impact assessments, to the UK Planning Inspectorate under the Planning Act 2008 to develop the scheme.

The Planning Inspectorate will review the application before public examination and the Secretary of State for Energy & Climate Change’s determination.

Initially, the company will develop an £850m project at Swansea Bay and four more lagoons with a capacity of 7,300MW later, with an intention to supply 10% of the UK’s domestic electricity by developing these five lagoons by 2023.

Swansea Bay Tidal Lagoon calls for the construction of a 9.5km-long sea wall that will capture enough renewable energy from incoming and outgoing tides. Construction is expected to start in the first half of 2015 with first power generation set for 2018.

Spanning across of 11.5km² cordoned off by a breakwater, the Swansea Bay project will have an installed capacity of 320MW, generating 420GWh of electricity annually, which is enough to power more than 120,000 homes for 120 years.

Tidal Lagoon Power CEO Mark Shorrock said the second lagoon will need minimal support compared with offshore wind, for a renewable power supply that is both long-lived and certain, while the third will be competitive with the support received by new nuclear, but comes without the decommissioning costs and safety concerns.

The £2.3bn second project will be built in Colwyn Bay and the £4bn third one will be based in the upper Severn estuary, while the company is yet to specify the locations for the remaining two projects being built at a cost of £4.5bn.

“Had we invested in tidal lagoons in the 1980s, by now, and into the next century, we would be generating cheaper power than any other form of supply,” said Shorrock.

The company, alongside a consortium of businesses including Atkins, Costain, GE, Alstom, Andritz and Voith, has spent three years developing its proof-of-concept project, while it has the commitment of Macquarie to lead the capital financing of the project itself.

Finnish energy company Fortum has committed €40m in its associated company Turun Seudun Energiantuotanto’s (TSE) new combined heat and power (CHP) plant in Naantali.

Expected to be commissioned in the last quarter of 2017, the €260m plant, which can be fuelled by biomass, coal and high-quality recycled waste, will replace the 50-year-old coal-fired power plant in the region.

Efforts are also being made to design it to operate exclusively on biomass, mainly of locally sourced wood chips transported from surroundings in a radius of around 100km to 150km.

Initially the CHP plant is expected to consume wood chips of about 0.7 million cubic meters a year and eventually up to 1.2 million cubic meters a year.

To be funded by shareholders and external financing, the project, with a capacity of 142MW electricity and 244MW heat, will significantly contribute to the growth of the local economy.

In addition to producing 900GWh electricity and 1,650GWh heat annually, the plant will create 200 permanent jobs for sourcing of the domestic biomass and 500 jobs at the peak of the construction phase.

In December 2013, the board of directors of TSE, in which Fortum has a 49.5% stake, has agreed to propose the plant investment to the annual general meeting.

Fortum heat division vice-president Jouni Haikarainen said the company is pursuing growth in energy-efficient combined heat and power production in line with its strategy by investing in the new plant in Naantali.

“The fact that the new power plant aims to utilise as much domestic biomass as possible also makes the new project an interesting one for Fortum,” said Haikarainen.