Media articles about Solarcentury.
The Guardian: The house that 10:10 rebuilt
Five months ago, a gang of builders descended on Will Homoky and Catherine Beswick's three-bed, semi-detached house in Bristol and began to rip it apart. Floorboards came up, the front door was removed, a few walls came down. At one point, the couple even had to move out. "We've had some sleepless nights in anticipation, thinking over the scale of the changes to come," Homoky admitted as the builders got to work on a bitterly cold February morning. "But having spent our first winter in this 130-year-old house, we're really excited about the heat savings these changes will make."
All that tearing apart was, indeed, for a greater good. Homoky and Beswick won more than £20,000 of home improvements in a competition run by the Great British Refurb Campaign, in association with 10:10. More than 8,000 properties entered, but Homoky and Beswick's Victorian-era home was chosen because it offered the best chance to highlight how a range of new, green technologies can greatly reduce the carbon impact of our homes. By the time the builders had finished, they reckoned their changes would cut the house's carbon emissions by 79%, from 2.8 tonnes to 607kg a year, and energy use by 69%, from 1,126 kilowatt-hours to 349 kilowatt-hours a year.
Read the full story on the Guardian website.
The Financial Times: You have had the credit crisis - next it will be oil
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.
Building Magazine: Savills offers PV advice on Feed-in tariffs
Property firm teams up with Solarcentury to encourage developers to make most of feed-in tariffs.
PV specialist Solarcentury has teamed up with real estate advisor Savills to help property companies take advantage of feed-in tariffs for renewable energy.
Feed-in tariffs pay a guaranteed rate of return for up to 25 years which now make investing in renewable technology a viable proposition.
The firms said demand for information on how to incorporate PV panels into buildings had prompted the move.
The service will be offered as part of Savills corporate real estate offer and will include financial analysis, design, planning, project management and ongoing support.
