Solar Media Staff

The London Metropolitan University has designed an innovative building that pulls together the latest energy saving and generation technology in order to compete in the Solar Decathlon competition.

The Chancellor and the Chief Secretary to the Treasury have announced around £100 million of additional funding for Scottish renewable energy, in addition to the existing Scottish Government budget.

Friends of the Earth has followed through on its threat to take the Government to court after Ministers failed to respond to concerns it set out in a legal letter last week.

A letter to the Prime Minister, penned by the Cut Don’t Kill campaign and Friends of the Earth, has urged David Cameron to reconsider the scale and depth of reform facing the FiT payments, branding the current proposals as “wrong”.

BBC’s panorama show on Monday night was billed as an investigation into the truth behind the UK's rocketing energy bills. Surely a rational, unbiased report from the BBC’s well-respected Panorama show would present the benefits of solar PV and other renewable energies to the wider public, while sensibly explaining the implicit costs to the consumer of supporting such technologies – wouldn’t it?

The latest quarterly-updated report from IMS Research has indicated that significant decreases in the “new” manufacturing capacity required coupled with a limited demand for upgrade or replacement of existing capacity will result in a projected market decline of over 55 percent in revenues in 2012 from 2011.

Since the December 12 deadline was announced, several concerns have arisen in the UK solar industry, the most recent of which is that all solar installations must actually be completed by November 25 as DECC will only guarantee to process MCS certifications within 10 days of installation.

  MITIE energy have designed and installed a 49.4kWp system for the Mitsubishi Electric headquarters in Hatfield, Hertfordshire. The rooftop installation is expected to generate 42,000kWh per year, saving over 22 tonnes of CO2 from being emitted every year.

Greg Barker is misunderstood. He has come under heavy criticism from those within and without the solar industry in the UK and I can see why. It is never easy to be the hatchet man when there is a tight budget in the offing and it is even more difficult to know deep down that the system (political and economic) you are forced to work with is far from ideal and constantly places you between a rock and a hard place.

In the small window of opportunity offered by the UK’s Department of Energy and Climate Change (DECC) between the latest feed-in tariff announcement and the December 12 cut-off point, it is expected that hundreds – if not thousands – of solar installations will be added to the Ofgem register. The fact is: by offering…