Growing acceptance of Solar Keymark can help overcome trade barriers for solar thermal products.

At the end of the past millennium, Spain set itself an ambitious goal as part of its national plan to promote renewable energies: to complete the installation of 4.8 million m2 of collector surface by 2010. But little action and few specific programmes have followed on the heels of those bold political sentiments. In fact there have been so few initiatives that Javier García Breva, Director of the National Energy Agency (IDAE), sounded the alarm in a press release last October. He said that due...

New report on "Best practice policies to develop Renewable Heat markets" sees right policies as key to rapid market take-off.

For many years, policies supporting renewable energy have focused on the electricity sector - in fact, many have even used the terms renewable energy (RES) and renewable electricity (RES-E) interchangeably. Only recently has interest in other forms of renewable energy at an EU level picked up. Last year, the EC Directive on biofuels in the transport sector came into force, and now, interest in renewable heating and cooling (RES-H) is, at last, steadily increasing.

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Solar air-conditioning technology is still in its infancy. For the time being, only 40 solar energy plants with a total collector area of some 17,000 square meters provide a total cooling capacity of 4.4 megawatts in Europe. Of those, 25 are installed in Germany alone. The air-conditioning market has so far been dominated by electric compression cooling machines. Manufacturers of air-conditioning systems sell around 100 million of these coolers worldwide every year despite the fact that they...