Specifiers and architects are seriously lacking knowledge when it comes to solar energy, claim Photovoltaic (PV) specialists. B&E hears how other European countires encourage solar power, and how the German approach might give UK specifiers the kick they need.

If you talk to the green lobby, you will hear how solar energy can make a massive contribution to reducing carbon emissions. If you talk to the government, it will claim to back the technology wholeheartedly. The government even put its money where its mouth is when Chancellor Gordon Brown gave homeowners incentives to fit photovoltaic (PV) panels out of this year’s budget.

But Solion director Ian Sillett is unconvinced that the UK is doing all it can to embrace the technology, and we might have to look at how our continental cousins encourage the PV market to resolve the issue. “There has been an explosion of PV in Germany,” Sillett says. “They introduced a system to encourage people to move over to solar energy that’s proved so popular that people are even taking money out of the stock exchange and putting it into PV because they see it as a sure bet.”

Sillett says he is enthused by the German system as he claims homeowners can see exactly where they are saving money. The system encourages homeowners to feed unused electricity from PV cells back into the national grid. For any energy they feed into the grid, they receive eight times the price of what they would have paid for the electricity in the first place. German homeowners find the scheme such a winner because their government has guaranteed it will to pay the money for 20 years. The Spanish have introduced the system on the strength of its success in Germany, and, says Sillett, there is now talk of rolling it out to Portugal and Italy.

Sillett says the UK government is looking at the feed-in tariff system, although it is early days to say to what extent it could be adopted in place of the current grants. “I don’t think the UK government would be as generous as the Germans,” he says, “but they might move away from the current grant support system they have now. “It is an incentive to housebuilders because at the moment the payback for a grant takes a long time, whereas a homeowner can go down to their generator room and see instantly how much money they’re making back off the cost of the PV cell.”

UK contractors and designers are required to incorporate PVs into some large schemes to meet targets for renewable energy. Sillett says he can see this requirement spreading across the industry. “In London and Liverpool any new site has to have 10% renewables onsite,” he says. “Architects have to incorporate that to get planning, and in all probability this 10% rule of energy generation onsite is going to proliferate across the country.” Sillett says specifiers and designers lack knowledge on what is needed to meet targets of renewable energy sources.  "There  isn’t a lot of knowledge amongst architects and specifiers and they’re scrambling to meet these targets. I think there’s a huge knowledge gap right the way through the construction industry, from specifiers onwards.”

He warns that contractors will be missing out on business if they do not gen up on what buildings will need to meet the targets. “Any contractor who’s unaware of the rules of energy generation if going to be missing opportunities to move into tangential areas of their existing business. If you are a roofing contractor, you’re going to be missing out. If you aren’t aware of the products on the market place, you could well be constructing buildings that won’t be able to get through the planning process in the future.”