Green Assembly Member Baroness Jenny Jones calls for the Mayor of London to support her draft ‘Mayoral Decision’ to support wider solar energy implementation in London, as a clean renewable alternative to proposed fracking plans.
New Feed-in-Tariff statistics published (23rd Jan 2014) on installed solar photovoltaics (PV) by the Department of Energy & Climate Change have shown that:
- London remains the region with the lowest level of installed solar PV capacity of mainland Britain and is dropping further behind. The ‘North East’ region (which overtook London in 2012 leaving it bottom), managed to increase its solar PV capacity by 9 percent in the latest quarter, London with far higher solar exposure managed just over a 5 percent increase.
- Only 1 in 221 London households have gone ahead with solar panels. The ‘South West’ of England has eight times the rate of installation as London (1 in 28 homes).
Jenny has sent a draft ‘Mayoral Decision’ she would like Boris Johnson to sign to set-up a Solar PV (Photovoltaic) Delivery Unit at City Hall. The proposal forms part of the budget process for 2015/16, and would allocate £210,000 to a unit which would initially focus on deploying solar PV panels on London schools and the GLA Group’s own estate, and also help set-up new community energy schemes.
London Assembly Member Jenny Jones said: “These latest figures are really disappointing as London’s rooftops have the potential to generate about a fifth of London’s annual electricity needs from solar energy.”
And unlike ‘fracking’, which Boris Johnson is an enthusiastic advocate, solar generated electricity avoids the risk of contaminating ground water, disruptive truck movements through local communities, the massive water requirements it needs, and the fact that it is just another fossil fuel that will accelerate climate change”
“The technology is here and so is the hunger from consumers, schools, businesses to maximise solar generated energy. However, without a decisive Mayoral intervention, London will continue to miss out and risks falling even further behind. It is essential that Boris Johnson sets up a Solar Delivery Unit to help schools and communities bust through the barriers and get thousands of new panels installed”