Renew On Line (UK) 26

Extracts from the May-June 2000 edition of Renew
These extracts only represent about 25% of it

12. Solar Booms - but not in the UK

Japan's photovoltaic manufacturers expanded production by 63% last year. The list of Japanese firms manufacturing PV reads like a roll-call of those that have successfully established themselves as UK household names: Canon, Sanyo and Sharp. Moreover, joint output from these three companies overtook the top producer, Kyocera. Virtually all of the increased output was to serve the Japanese programme for 70,000 solar roofs by 2010. Meanwhile, the recently published UK review of renewable energy has just consigned domestic photovoltaics to the "after 2010" category. The most recent statements by UK Energy Minister Helen Liddell read like an instruction to PV companies to get up and leave the UK. Her Parliamentary Answer on 28th January said, "For the short term, photovoltaics (PV) is a relatively expensive technology, and the cost is unlikely to decrease sufficiently for it to make more than a small contribution to carbon emission reductions in the UK over the next decade."

However, in 1997 BP's John Browne, who is certainly closer than the Minister to the commercial realities, said to The Financial Times that solar could "become competitive in supplying peak electricity demand within the next ten years."

However, solar power is caught in a Catch-22: the price of PV cells is too high, so only a few people buy solar, and because the market is small, manufacturers will not invest in mass production. Global business analysts KPMG have concluded that the technology is ready for mass production and that an investment of $660 million in a solar factory is all that is needed to break this negative cycle: the price of PV electricity would be reduced by 80%.

Only a few companies are in a position to make such an investment. BP is one of them. BP has heavily promoted solar power as the energy of the future.

The company has declared that, "Solar's time has come." The cost of the solar factory is less than one percent of BP Amoco's global annual revenues; it is also equal to the cost of the Northstar Arctic drilling project.

The above was taken from Frontier News (Vol .2 Issue 2) Greenpeace's electronic newsletter, which regularly covers renewable energy issues; see http://www.greenpeace.org.uk  Greenpeace has been campaigning to alert BP Amoco shareholders to this issue; see http://www.sanebp.com