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| The "green" community and indeed "green" communities worldwide fully appreciate benefits related to any reduction of fossil based fuels such as coal, oil or gas. The change of climate patterns has caused coastal areas to be reclaimed by the seas, desert areas to expand, low lying land to be submerged, wind to distort crops and other vital vegetation. In addition the reduction of rain forest has decreased the carbon sink resource with the inevitable environmental time bomb.
The consequence of these factors are not lost on a number of socially responsible governments who actively seek to stimulate the use of PV in both private and public sectors. Germany has a project to support installing PV to some 100,000 houses; Spain has a government that applies pressure on national electricity utilities to offer considerable commercial incentives for PV installations on domestic houses. Japan's government has supplied the largest PV investment worldwide. The UK on the other hand has published a White Paper with a number of intentions, in particular PV for social housing. The number of actual domestic houses with a substantial PV content may be less than 50 at the present time. In addition there has been an indication that the electrical utilities are prepared to pay an incentive to domestic "green" electricity suppliers. In fact the position is that any "green" energy supplied to the utilities from a "green" resource is premium charged by the utilities with no benefit to the supplier at all. We would hope that this might be rectified in the near future. However the government has provided some assent to the education sector and close to 100 PV demonstrations systems have been installed country wide via the European based "scholar" programme. Japan's offer various direct grants for specific applications including 67% capital grants for industrial PV systems and by 1996 had installed 55mw, which will rise to 4600Mw by 2010. They offered a specific PV budget of £75 Million set against the British government investment of (2001) £100 Million for all the renewable energy generation sectors. Japan's residential roof top PV programme started (1994) receives a capital subsidy of 50% and 67% for commercial buildings. Tokyo's has the world's largest PV solar site at the HQ of telecommunications giant NTT. 1999 Japans annual output from PV companies was about 30-40Mw of generating capacity 2010 hopes to be 4,600Mw |
