Solar rules

All new Spanish buildings to include solar panels The Spanish government has announced new building regulations making it compulsory to fit solar water heating panels to all new homes. There’ll also be some subsidy to help offset the increase in construction costs. You might have thought that the sunny climate, the cost of oil and the existence of a sizeable Spanish solar panel manufacturing industry would already have put the country well up the list in terms of solar power use - but in fact Spain can only boast 581,000 square metres of solar panels to date, while Germany has nearly 10 times as much. The new nationwide requirement, already in force in Seville since 2001, is intended to rectify that situation - especially if the country’s construction boom continues at the current rate of some half a million new houses a year.

27 January 2005