Guest Blog

The Supreme Court has today refused the Department of Energy and Climate Change (DECC) permission to appeal the Court of Appeal’s judgement on the feed in tariff…

The price of residential solar panel installations has dropped by 50 percent since early 2011, according to research of over 1,500 consumer quotes by CompareMySolar. Therefore, consumers can achieve a similar financial return as before – despite cuts in the feed-in-tariff from 43p to 21p.

I have been one of the speakers at the Solar Power UK – Coping with the Cuts road-show that has been running over the last few weeks … talking partly about the forthcoming changes to the PV guide and partly about Energy Performance Certificates (EPCs)…

Last year was a watershed year for the PV installation market. Analyst house IMS research found that despite a relatively weak start to the year, global installations rose by 24 percent from 2010 – up to 24GW from 19GW…

DECC has published some FAQ’s on the Feed in tariff …

I have recently Just come across PV module that’s marketed as 235Wp +7% to +12% To me that’s a 251Wp module with 0-5% variation in output At first I was thinking – perhaps this is just marketing hype – but on reflection I am not so sure it isn’t more significant…

One thing is certain about the Feed in Tariff at the moment – there is currently a lot of uncertainty!

The Standard Assessment Procedure (SAP) is used to assess the energy performance of dwellings and includes a section to estimate the annual performance of a solar PV system. PV installers should be very familiar with the PV – SAP calculation as it is the method currently proscribed under the Microgeneration Certification Scheme (MCS).

A low afternoon sun is shining on our office PV system just now – and the back row has a small amount of shading on it (was predicted in our modelling).

Looking at comments on the draft of Edition 3 of the PV guide … bit surprised we didn’t get more comments on the AC module part of section 2.1.13 – d.c. isolation and switching…