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...

LONDON, England, 2004-12-01 Refocus Weekly A number of organizations in Britain have proposed the introduction of a legislated Green Heat obligation to encourage the use of renewable energies for non-electric applications.

Brussels, 24 November 2004. SP, the Swedish National Testing and Research Institute, announced that Sweden will lift the requirements on accelerated ageing tests, in order to facilitate foreign companies' access to the Swedish market. This decision followed a request from ESTIF and will enter in force from 1 January 2005.

Brussels/Berlin, 24 November 2004. The international solar thermal industry is becoming increasingly interconnected. The heightened need for an international exchange of ideas is met by the 2nd European Solar Thermal Industry Conference, estec2005, which is taking place from 21 to 22 June 2005 in Freiburg/Germany. ESTIF, the European Solar Thermal Industry Federation, has called for papers to be submitted for the conference. The focus is on international solar thermal energy markets,...

Berlin, 17 November 2004. After intensive talks, the Board and managing directors of the two leading solar associations in Germany, BSi and UVS, have recommended to start a merger procedure. BSi members already agreed to the merger.

10 November 2004. The International Energy Agency’s Solar Heating and Cooling Programme and major solar thermal trade associations publish new statistics on the use of solar thermal energy. The new data – expressed for the first time in GWth, rather than in square meters of installed collector area – shows the global installed capacity to be 70 GWth (70.000 MWth).

Brussels, 18/09/2007: The first comprehensive study on solar obligations was published by ESTIF today. The study is based on case studies and experiences from five countries. Solar obligations are considered as a key instrument to promote a renewable and sustainable heat supply in Europe.

Brussels/Freiburg, 19 June: As the fastest growing sector in renewable heating and cooling, solar thermal can deliver a substantial contribution to reaching the EU targets for renewables, if the right policies are quickly introduced at EU level and in the Member States.

Brussels/Freiburg, 19 June: estec2007, the largest international solar thermal conference ever held opens today in Freiburg. With 550 participants from over 50 countries, estec has almost doubled its size, confirming its status as the premier solar thermal event worldwide.

Brussels/Freiburg, 19 June: Since the decision of the European Union to set a binding target of 20% renewables in 2020, it becomes more and more obvious that renewable heating and cooling must play a large role to achieve this target. The need to rapidly increase the usage of solar thermal energy leads to a strong discussion within the sector, regarding which technological developments are needed.

Brussels, 24 April 2007. A new survey on the Italian solar thermal market shows that about 130 MWth (186,000 m²) new capacity was installed during 2006. This makes Italy the fifth largest solar thermal market in Europe. This figure shows that the size of the Italian market had been vastly underestimated during the last few years.