The Government is failing to ensure that new buildings are fitted with solar panels or heated by low carbon systems. Every year large quantities of buildings with massive potential for solar PV or thermal are built without them and the buildings continue to be fitted with gas boilers to provide heating. Under the UK  Government’s policy of setting unambitious ‘technology neutral’ emissions targets for new buildings there will be a competition between heat pumps and solar panels to meet the small targets that have so far been set for carbon reduction. In reality, poorly resourced local authorities may not be able to challenge mystifying designs produced by architects hired by developers that do little, in reality, to reduce carbon emissions compared to the earlier building standards.

Meanwhile Germany is busy implementing a plan of making solar panels mandatory on all new commercial buildings and the standard practice on new homes as well. Why cannot this be done in the UK? According to the Building Research Establishment, if solar pv was installed on just all south-facing commercial roofspace ‘this could provide approximately 50% of the UK’s electricity demand’. Fitting solar panels on all houses could generate massive quantities of solar energy on top of this.

Moreover, the Government’s (ostensible)  plans to ban fossil fuel boilers in new buildings from 2025 face being undermined by the natural gas industry. In fact the Government  has a very slippery set of commitments that amount to merely a policy for ‘zero-carbon-ready’ buildings. The gas industry hope to interpret this as, in effect, gas installation as usual, with talk of ‘blending’ hydrogen with natural gas sometime in the future using so-called  ‘hydrogen ready’ boilers. The Government’s current plans lack clear means to achieve their heat pump targets apart from some as yet unspecified ‘market-based mechanism’.

A straightforward approach is to simply ban fossil fuel heating in new buildings from 2025, but this is nowhere in Government policy. Installing heat pumps in new buildings will result in little extra building costs but will improve energy efficiency by around 70 per cent compared to gas boilers. The addition of mandatory solar panels will, once we approach 100 per cent renewable electricity, make energy used in new buildings carbon negative!

We also need stricter energy efficiency standards for new buildings to ensure that buildings conserve renewable energy.

We need both solar technologies and heat pumps to be installed as soon as possible, and certainly always in new homes and buildings. Please sign this petition and, preferably, sign up to receive further information on the this green buildings campaign. In Germany there is a growing practice of requiring solar panels to be fitted to all new buildings, and heat pumps are being fitted several more times frequently than is the case in the UK. Indeed fossil fuel boilers are now banned in new buildings in Germany. The petition will be sent to the relevant ministers, Michael Gove (local government) and Greg Hands (Energy). We hope, later, among other actions to launch an official petition to the Government.

Further background information on this issue is available here.

SIGN THE PETITION HERE