The Institute for Sustainability has launched a free toolkit that can apply to urban areas which shows the opportunities that arise from using renewable energy and low carbon markets.

Although specifically targeted at the South East of England, many of the comments are applicable in most parts of the world, with the exception of country-specific data on subsidy support.

The Renewable Energy Toolkit aims to help enterprises, whether public or private, including property owners, asset managers and other potential investors, understand the relevance and viability of individual technologies, how they might be used.

The overall intention is to encourage the move towards a sustainable low carbon future.

Ian Short, Chief Executive at the Institute for Sustainability, said: "Renewable energy will play a major role in helping the UK to fulfil its carbon reduction commitments, whilst at the same time addressing energy security in a world where current resources are becoming increasingly constrained.

"With renewable energy production expected to double by 2020 in the UK, investment in solar, wind, biomass, hydropower and heat pumps in particular presents large emerging markets for both suppliers and installers. This means significant opportunities for SMEs in the built environment sector."

It contains sections on technology and deployment, the renewable energy resource in south-east England, using the local supply chain, existing and future policies and incentives, managing finance and contracts, barriers and challenges to deployment, and case studies.

It covers a wide range of renewable and low carbon technologies, including anaerobic digestion, using wood as a fuel, heat pumps (both air, above right, and ground-source), low-head hydropower, solar thermal systems, solar photovoltaics, and wind power – both large and small scale.

Hydropower (like the  Archimedes screw hydro turbine, right) is one of the most expensive renewables technologies to develop in terms of £/kW installed, but it also generates the most electricity during its long design life and is suitable for base load power supply.

The toolkit discusses this and the main barriers to deployment for all of the technologies.

The toolkit also looks at a range of financing methods. One of the most common for implementing small-scale to medium scale projects of this nature is through an Energy Service Company (ESCo).

The advantage of an independent ESCo to an energy consumer is that they do not have to put together the initial capital or take the risks to adopt low carbon technology.

To encourage interest, the ESCo may supply energy at a slightly lower rate than the large utilities through a long-term contract giving both security of supply and visibility of cost to the user.

The downside is that the consumer of the energy does not benefit from any income or payment made through government schemes for using a renewable source of energy. This often encourages organisations to set up ESCos themselves.

The financing structure of an energy service company (ESCo):

The toolkit provides a range of case studies with technical and financial details.

Installing ground source heat pumps with boreholes (right) and trenches (left).

The following table is a summary of most of the projects for which financial information is available in consistent form, showing the payback period for the investment and the internal rate of return.

It's clear from this limited information that biomass woodchip systems have the best rate of return when managed properly, but their source heat pumps will pay for themselves quicker.

Different renewable energy technologies also have different visual impacts, which can affect public feelings and the ability to obtain planning permission, and these are largely dependent upon their generation capacity, as can be seen in the diagram below.

Visual impact versus generation capacity of different renewable energy technologies:

The Institute's Renewable Energy Toolkit is part funded by the European Regional Development Fund (ERDF).