Solar PV Panels In The UK

The UK government has pledged to cut its carbon emissions by 60% by the year 2050. In order to that, there are going to have to be some major changes! One of those is the implementation of more solar panels, enabling a significantly higher proportion of electricity to be generated using the sun’s radiation, as opposed to using fossil fuels.

At the moment, only 1% of homes in the UK generate their own power using solar pv panels. This is pretty poor, to be honest. It’s especially poor when you look at a country with a similar climate, Germany, and consider that there, 40% of homes use solar electricity generation means. And the weather is a common reason people use not to install solar panels. Yet despite our cloudy climate in the UK, we still get 65% as much solar radiation as Spain gets and 55% as much as there is on the equator! So really, the weather is no excuse.

Because the Government wants more of us to install solar panels and begin generating green electricity, it has introduced a feed-in tariff. This feed-in tariff is a massive financial incentive to get Britain (hopefully) going solar. The feed-in tariff means that a household or business in the UK using solar panels to generate electricity can be paid for every single unit they produce. This includes the units they produce themselves too! They’ll also be paid an additional premium for any units that they produce and export back to the grid.

Because of this, the reduced electricity bills and the fact that solar pv panels can add around 10% to the value of your property, solar panel installation has become a particularly attractive investment, rather than a costly expense. The feed- in tariff means that the average return on solar panels will be 8% a year!

And that is certainly what the Government hope. Their ambitious pledges at the Copenhagen climate convention at the end of 2009 must be met and solar panel installation is looking like the most promising means of making it happen.

Get all the information you need on Solar PV Panels

Technorati Tags: Finance, society, solar choice, solar panel installation, solar pv panels