According to a guardian.co.uk article…

British buildings equipped with solar, wind and other micro power equipment could generate as much electricity in a year as five nuclear power stations, a government-backed industry report showed today.

Commissioned by the Department for Business, Energy and Regulatory Reform (DBERR), the report says that if government chose to be as ambitious as some other countries, a combination of loans, grants and incentives could lead to nearly 10m microgeneration systems being installed by 2020.

Such a large scale switch to microrenewable energy could save 30m tonnes of CO2 – the equivalent of nearly 5% of all UK electricity.

The report estimates that there are nearly 100,000 microgeneration units already installed in Britain. Nearly 90,000 of these are solar water heaters, with limited numbers of biomass boilers, photovoltaic panels, heat pumps, fuel cells, and small-scale hydroelectric and windpower schemes.

It goes on to point out that the Britian is lagging behind in the governement solar incentive game, and that they really need to make some policy changes to get a serious improvement in solar (and other renewable energy) inplimentation, but I have a different question. This is not the first report detailing the potential of small scall home-based solar technology to dramatically reduce energy use from non-renewable sources (not to mention cheaper for the consumer, and all the other benefits beyond the standard environmental issues, of which there are plenty), so why isn’t more being done to push solar tech into the homes as they are being built? There are plenty of options for building PV cells right into roofs, I recently wrote about a technology that allows the production of seethrough cells that could be implemented right into windows, solar water heaters are a vast improvement and are simple to have installed…and I haven’t heard a damn thing about pushing this stuff at the construction level.

If all this solar stuff is so great, and would produce so much energy directly in the home, in a completely renewable (and pretty cost effective) way, why aren’t these technologies being pushed into the building standards at least to a degree? The government is pushing for a lot of after-the-fact stuff, with incentive programs and the like, but there isn’t much at all about BEFORE the fact stuff. We need to get this stuff installed when the buildings are going up. It’s cheaper than retrofitting, it would be a massive help to the environment (and to the home owner’s wallets).

It’s crazy not to do it? Isn’t it? Am I missing something here? It seems to me that someone is really dropping the ball, so to speak, by pushing solar tech into already built homes, and ignoring the ones constantly poping up using the old wasteful techology…just to try to get them to switch to some solar tech after the fact. If I’m wrong here someone has to explain it to me. The comment section is right down there if anyone cares to give it a go. Have at it.

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