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News Release from: Solarcentury | Subject: Survival technologies
Edited by the Buildingtalk Editorial
Team on 04 November 2005
Get serious about the survival
technologies
Get serious about the survival technologies, solarcentury tells UK Government.
The DTI today announced a GBP30 m allocation for renewable micropower market enablement over the next three years, and that there would after all be no gap in funding between the Major Demonstration Programme for photovoltaics, and the Low Carbon Buildings Programme Dr Jeremy Leggett, solarcentury CEO and member of the Government's Renewables Advisory Board, commented as follows
This article was originally published on Buildingtalk on 18 Dec 2003 at 8.00am (UK)
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"There are half a dozen members of the renewable micropower family".
"The Low Carbon Buildings Programme is supposed to enable markets for all of them, plus energy efficiency".
"Given that support for all solar technologies in 2005-6 is running at around the GBP14m level, this announcement amounts to a drastic cut in funding".
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After a visit to Solarcentury in London, UK Prime Minister Tony Blair says it's time to fight global warming with solar power and homegrown renewables.
"Yet before and after the 2003 Energy White Paper, successive ministers promised escalating support for these technologies at a level that would allow the embryonic British solar industry to compete with German, Japanese and other foreign industries".
""It seems that our efforts at collaborating with this government behind closed doors have been of little use.
We need now to say it like it is.
We live on a planet that is dying as things stand because of our profligate greenhouse gas emissions.
The Government accepts this.
More than half UK emissions come directly or indirectly from buildings.
The Government knows this.
Renewable micropower technologies like solar PV and solar thermal offer the opportunity, in harness with energy efficiency, to cut these emissions deeply or entirely.
Government ministers have said this and companies like solarcentury has demonstrated it.
Yet just as overseas Governments stimulate their micro-renewables markets into explosive growth, our own drip feeds these survival technologies, meanwhile professing to be a leader in the fight against climate change.
The Government has to wake up to the increasingly embarrassing discordance between its rhetoric and the reality".
""The DTI tell us there is not enough money to support renewables the way they would like".
"We do not accept this".
"When we look at other government pending priorities, and their scale, we ask ourselves why building amazing new industries that can safeguard a viable future for our children should come so far down the list of priorities".
"And we observe the pan-government efforts to resurrect nuclear power, with its multi-billion pound calls in perpetuity on the public purse, with what might politely be called great suspicion.".
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