The BRE National Solar Centre (NSC) has carried out a comprehensive survey of jobs in the solar sector in 2013, detailing both staffing numbers and site installation activities. Commissioned by the Department of Energy and Climate Change (DECC), the resulting data will be used to quantify the economic impact of the UK’s progress on solar … Continue reading “National Solar Centre measures jobs growth”
Market understanding, long term commitment and collaboration again emerge as the critical factors in successful innovation in the sector. We caught up with Hamish Watson, inventor of the Polysolar Building Integrated Transparent Solar Glass. Polysolar has developed the world’s first completely transparent low-cost photovoltaic (PV) glazing that can generate electricity with around 20% light transmission … Continue reading “Plastic Electronics to Building Products – Polysolar Building Integrated Transparent Solar Glass”
We caught up with Steve Pester, Principal Consultant from the BRE National Solar Centre to find out how work funded by the BRE Trust is helping improve safety and performance of photovoltaic systems. The research found that minor components installed incorrectly can lead to poor performance and safety issues in photovoltaic systems. This was then … Continue reading “Driving safety and performance for photovoltaic systems”
In 2013, Greg Barker, the then Minister State for Energy and Climate Change officially opened the BRE National Solar Centre, the UK solar industry was flourishing with approximately 8,800 new PV systems being installed every month adding over 1.1GW of capacity within the year. A lot has changed for solar over the last 5 years. … Continue reading “5 years on and the futures bright for BRE National Solar Centre”
FlexiSolar, the innovative solar carport specialist based near Cambridge, has started construction of a large scale commercial carport at Bentley Motors’ manufacturing headquarters in Crewe, Cheshire. In a six-month project due to complete in September 2018, FlexiSolar will construct what is set to become the UK’s largest solar carport system to date, with 10,000 solar … Continue reading “FlexiSolar to install UK’s largest solar carport system for Bentley Motors”
A few eyebrows were raised when in 2015 the Renewable Energy Association (REA) launched its representation of the energy storage sector, and again in 2017 when it did the same for electric vehicles. “What does this have to do with renewables?” Is a question we have been asked often. The answer is key to where … Continue reading “Solar, energy storage, and electric vehicles – joining up the clean technologies”
Next week at the Solar PV Summit, BRE will be launching a certification scheme for large scale solar – an area of the UK solar market that is not currently regulated for installation quality. The certification scheme will provide an ongoing impartial assessment of solar PV installations above 50kW. The purpose of the scheme is … Continue reading “Solar assurance the BRE way”
Solar on commercial roofs has always lagged behind the domestic rooftop market. Currently, less than 5% of UK solar installations are on commercial roofs, compared to approximately 94% of systems installed on homes[1]. Commercial properties have large, generally unused roofs, and account for about 8% of the UK’s energy consumption[2]. Installing solar can make sound … Continue reading “BRE solar on commercial roofs guide to launch at the Solar PV Summit”
This is a question that we get asked regularly at the NSC and a surprisingly high percentage of owners either do not check, or have any way of knowing, how their solar PV system is performing. The majority of system owners invest in solar PV for financial reasons and under-performing systems can effect the calculations … Continue reading “How do you know if your solar PV system is performing well?”
The NSC have been supporting APSE Energy and assisting a number of their member local authorities through the development stages of large scale solar projects, providing technical expertise for planning and grid connection applications. Three sites, with a cumulative capacity of 12.4MW, have now received planning consent and grid offers and a further eight sites … Continue reading “NSC helps secure planning for solar farms on old colliery sites”