My Climate Change Garden

This wonderfully warm UK summer is not just a  great boost for our gardens but  the solar power market is really heating up.

Long sunny spells and a surge in people installing PV panels has resulted in record level of solar power generation.

The Met Office said it was too early to say whether British sunshine records will be broken in July. But they released figures showing that England and Wales received over 75% of the long-term monthly average for July in the first two weeks of the month.

Whatever the record is, it seems that weeks of strong sunshine across much of Britain and a surge in photovoltaic (PV) panels installations has resulted in the record generation of solar power, according to figures from government and the industry.

There are now over 450,000 solar installations, almost all on household roofs, which together have a capacity of 2.7GW. On a sunny day solar power is able to generate around 2% of UK demand over a 24-hour period. But because solar panels generate electricity in peak daylight hours, this is the equivalent of around 6% of all electricity needed in Britain between 10am and 5pm.

According to calculations by the Solar Trade Association, record amounts of electricity will have been generated in the recent heatwave, with solar overtaking wind power for the first time. In the past year, more than 100,000 households installed solar despite the so-called feed in tariff subsidy being slashed by the government.

“These few sunny weeks have shown that the solar resource in Britain is phenomenal,” said Leonie Greene, Communications Director of the association.

“We now have a very large number of domestic installations and around one-third of the solar electricity generated now comes from utility-sized solar fields. But there are still very few medium-sized commercial or industrial installations. If the government backed these they would see enormous payback.”.

http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2013/jul/26/summer-solar-power-photovoltaic-panels

Investing in solar power is becoming increasingly attractive and a new company called Abundance now offers direct investment into a range of renewable energy projects in the UK. Abundance is the first renewable energy crowd sourcing company in the UK and has already raised funds to support the development of privately funded solar power projects.

Homes, small businesses, and communities are quietly driving a revolution in the energy sector, installing gigawatts of renewable energy capacity through clean technologies, such as rooftop solar panels and wind turbines.  So big is the decentralised energy market, that the “Big Six” now own a minority of the UK’s renewables capacity. http://blog.abundancegeneration.com/2013/06/can-the-big-six-become-the-big-sixty-thousand/

Find out more about how solar power is increasing in popularity and how crowd funding investment  is crucial to its future success at:  http://blog.abundancegeneration.com/2013/01/the-revolutionary-rise-of-the-energy-prosumer/