It goes without saying that roof space is often not a problem for farmers, but only recently in the UK have so many looked to them to produce clean

electricity. The introduction of the UK’s Feed-in tariff in April this year has proved an opportunity to investigate the potential of roof space to yield another income – as French farmers have been doing for years. The Feed-in tariff was introduced in France in 2008, spurring demand for solar photovoltaics (PV) across the country not least on farm buildings. Solarcentury has worked with many French farmers to help them make the best of the incentives and new technology.

Mr and Mrs Jean-Noël Simard are poultry farmers from Burgundy in France, who installed 470 solar panels on their barns in April 2010. They’re adamant going solar was the right thing to do: “Our solar roof, an ‘Energy Roof’, is an excellent way of diversifying revenue streams for farmers like us. The feed-in tariff makes solar a sound investment with which we can protect ourselves against rising electricity prices while saving many tonnes of C02 emissions too. Solar PV is simply now the best way to upgrade your farm.”

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Engineering giant GE and solar energy specialist Solarcentury have today teamed up to launch a financing service de

signed to rapidly accelerate the rollout of solar panels to UK schools.

Under the new agreement, GE Capital, the financial services arm of GE, will cover the bulk of the cost of installing solar technology under Solarcentury's Solar4Schools programme with schools or local authorities providing a small deposit of between £1,000 and £2,000.

The school will then lease the solar panels from GE Capital for 15 years using savings on its energy bills and funds raised through the government's feed-in tariff renewable energy incentive scheme. At the end of the 15-year period the school will take ownership of the solar panels, providing it with a further 10 years of revenue from the feed-in tariff.

Solarcentury said the initiative could enable schools to save up to £840 a year on electricity bills, while generating an income of more than £3,000 a year through the feed-in tariff.

The company calculated that a typical secondary school could enjoy income and savings of about £68,000 over the 25-year period in addition to delivering sizable cuts in its carbon footprint.

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By Jeremy Leggett, Executive Chairman, Solarcentury

As it now admits, BP "did not have the tools" to contain a deepwater oil leak. Its failure with that risk must now raise questions about its approach to other risks. Top of the list must be the threat that global oil production will fall sooner than generally forecast, ambushing oil-dependent economies with a rapidly opening gap between supply and demand. The approach of the point at which global oil supplies reach an apex, "peak oil" as it is often known, worries growing numbers of people. But, until now, BP has poured scorn on the worriers, encouraging the oil industry's effort to reassure society about peak oil. The disaster in the Gulf of Mexico casts doubt on the viability of the deepwater production on which industry forecasts depend.

Every year BP publishes a report that is effectively a risk assessment on peak oil arriving prematurely. Its Annual Statistical Review of World Energy, due out today, routinely states that there are about 40 years of proved oil reserves, that advances in technology will enable much more to be found and produced, that rising oil prices can finance the necessary exploration and infrastructure, and that global oil supply can go on rising for decades. Every year, peak-oil worriers say they doubt the Opec oil producers' reserve statistics that are echoed in BP's review, that technology can only slow depletion not reverse it, that rising oil prices do not help when it takes so many years to extract new oil from increasingly exotic locations and that global supply is heading for an imminent fall.

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