Netherlands

Last year’s sudden stop of the incentive programme Duurzame Warmte resulted in a drawback for the Dutch solar thermal industry. Still, Arthur de Vries from Holland Solar is convinced that 2012 and 2013 will be different: Probably even within the first quarter of this year, the Netherlands is going to have its own feed-in-tariff for renewable heat. Energy performance of new and existing buildings will be tested under stricter requirements and several provinces have launched their own incentive programme. The figure shows the annual installed solar thermal capacity in the Netherlands. It has increased significantly since the start of the Duurzame Warmte programme in September 2008.
Figure: ESTIF

Starting in January 2011, the Energy Performance Coefficient (EPC) building code in the Netherlands has set new and stricter limitations on housing construction. Although solar is not the only option to meet the new standards, it turns out to be the most economical solution in some of the projects. ZEN Renewables has just won a tender to install solar systems in two building projects in the centre of Holland. They will deliver energy to a combined number of 280 housing units.

The ISH is becoming increasingly international. At the beginning of this March, the world´s largest trade fair for bathroom, building, energy and climate technology in Frankfurt, Germany, has counted significantly more international visitors than ever before. 35 % of the 204,000 trade visitors came from abroad (2009: 29 %), whereas the total number of visitors almost stagnated (+1.5 %). The ISH is the trade fair of the European heating industry. The five largest corporations - Bosch Thermotechnik, Vaillant, Viessmann from Germany, BDR Thermea, Netherlands, and Ariston from Italy - dominated Hall 8 with huge stands. Solarthermalworld.org presents some of the trends it discovered in the solar thermal product portfolio of Europe's heating business.
Photo: ISH 2011

The European Solar Thermal Industry Federation is optimistic that the regulations for the energy labelling of dedicated water heaters in the framework of the Ecodesign Directive (2005/32/EC) are going to be adopted in good consensus in mid-2011. During the last few months, ESTIF's ecodesign and labelling task force, “has changed the content of the energy labelling and come up with a solution that broadens its scope and opens interesting perspectives for our industry,” Xavier Noyon states in an interview with the magazine Sun & Wind Energy.

There are two suppliers of punching machines from Israel challenging each other to have been the first to market on the market: Ravid Solar Solutions and Dagan Machine Engineering. The history of both companies shows certain parallels, as both companies were founded by former employers of Israeli collector manufacturers. The photo shows a fully automated punching machine by Ravid Solar Solutions.
Photo: Ravid Solar Solutions

This study is a product of a partnership between the European Solar Thermal Industry Association (today's ESTELA) and Greenpeace. It provides information on the current state of solar thermal technology, and develops a scenario for where the solar thermal market could be by the year 2020.

This document, prepared by the International Energy Agency, comes as a follow-up of the 2006 seminar “Renewable heating and cooling – from RD&D to deployment technology and policy” aimed at exploring guidelines and policy initiatives to boost technology development and market deployment for renewable heating and cooling (REHC).

This is a study assessing the market potential of small scale Combined Heating Cooling and Power (CHCP) in several European countries (Austria, Czech Republic, Germany, Italy, Netherlands, Poland, Portugal, Spain, Sweden and Switzerland).

The study is one of the final deliverables of the PolySMART Project (POLYgeneration with advanced small and medium scale thermally driven air-conditioning and refrigeration technology), an integrated project partly funded by the European Commission under 6th Framework Programme.

More detailed market figures can be found in this year’s ESTIF booklet: The 16-page market report is going to be published at the Intersolar Europe in Munich. For the first time, the report will include a map showing key figures as well as articles with background information on solar cooling and large solar thermal systems. Source: ESTIF

Everything revolves around the sun: 17 European countries participate in the 3rd edition of the European Solar Days from 1 to 16 May 2010. Around 6,600 events are planned for this year’s campaign, involving several hundred thousand citizens at a local level.
Photo: Fotostudio Pflueg