Solar panels are set to become mandatory be on all Europe’s new public, commercial buildings, and residential buildings buildings.
The European Union wants to boost the rollout of solar energy while also rebuilding Europe’s solar manufacturing industry.
As part of the EU’s new strategy to dump imports of Russian fuel by the end of the decade. To do that it needs to massively up the use of renewable energy in all European countries.
That means at least half of the EU’s energy would need to come from renewable sources by 2030 – almost double what the blocs renewable currently is.
While this will cost hundreds of billions of Euros, the move will helped by the money saved from moving away from imported fuel.
The move to solar comes alongside a whole range of other measures – this includes doubling the rollout of heat pumps to creating ‘go-to’ areas for renewables across the continent.
The EU ‘solar rooftop initiative’
The “solar rooftop initiative” will see new regulations making it mandatory to install solar panels on any new public, commercial and residential buildings by 2029.
The plan would also see the EU bring online 320 GW of solar photovoltaic energy by 2025, increasing to 600 GW by 2030. Currently solar only delivers 5% of total EU electricity generation so to reach the 2030 target, the EU must install at least 45 GW of solar capacity each per year.
The EU believes that rooftop PV can not only provide 25% of the EU’s electricity consumption but that the tech can be deployed rapidly to protect consumers from record high energy prices.
Key to the measures would see EU countries speeding up the planning permission process for rooftop solar installations and relaxing regulations on the size of the panels allowed on top of buildings.
The European Commission is now also looking on increasing its existing target for reducing energy consumption from 9% to 13% by 2030. To do this it will set about encouraging governments to implement policies to increase energy savings, like new taxes schemes to further support energy-efficient heating systems and building insulation.
