Policy

November 18, 2019
First district cooling regulation in the MENA region

Abu Dhabi now has its first comprehensive regulatory standard on district cooling. It is based on Act No. 11, which was passed in 2018 and put the responsibility for regulating the district cooling sector on the newly founded emirate’s Department of Energy. Following extensive consultations...
October 23, 2019
Green heat policies in China benefit heat pumps

Several provinces in northern China have implemented green heat policies to avoid air pollution from coal boilers. Beijing was the first province to create a policy in 2016 and others, such as Hebei and Shan Xi, then followed suit. Heat sources and technologies recognised as renewable in...
March 28, 2019
Rising demand for solar thermal in Uzbekistan

Techno Future, which is part of the Uzbekistan-based Artel Group, has been satisfied with sales in its first year after starting production in 2017. Bahodir Karimov, Deputy Managing Director of Techno Future, said that the company had manufactured 10,000 collectors, sold under the Royal...
February 28, 2019
Building regulations stabilise Spanish market

According to national solar energy association ASIT, the Spanish solar thermal market was up by 2 % and added 205,530 m² (144 MW_th) of collector area in 2018 compared to 2017. An increase in newbuilds was the main reason for that growth – a trend which is expected to...
October 28, 2018
A closer look at six Latin American and Caribbean markets

Fundación Bariloche, a private-sector research institute based in Argentina, has recently published a report on the differences between the solar thermal markets in Barbados, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Mexico and Uruguay. The authors of the study take a look at key factors for growth, such as...
August 23, 2018
RVO renewable heat incentive statistics online

Since January 2016, a subsidy scheme by the Netherlands Enterprise Agency, also known as RVO, has led to the installation of 66,659 renewable heating systems in the country, the ISDE Viewer...
August 17, 2018
Successful solar energy bylaw in Bengaluru, India

Bengaluru Electricity Supply Company, a public utility also known as BESCOM, has been successful in implementing a bylaw to encourage the use of solar energy. Since 2009, 1,234 million m² of collector area had been installed in Bengaluru and had supplied energy equivalent to about 611...
July 18, 2018
Sector coupling still at an early stage

‘Sector coupling’ has become one of the most well-known terms to describe the transformation of energy markets. It had originally been created for models that use surplus renewables, such as wind and solar electricity, to provide heat and power new means of transport. International...
June 28, 2018
Global electricity demand for air conditioning to triple by 2050

“Growing demand for air conditioners is one of the most critical blind spots in today’s energy debate,” Fatih Birol, Executive Director of the IEA, said as he presented the findings of The Future of Cooling report in May. The chart shows that, in the baseline scenario, cooling is projected...
June 26, 2018
Europe’s first-ever renewable heating and cooling target

After night-long negotiations, the European Parliament and Council have reached an agreement on the Renewable Energy Directive for 2030. At long last, discussions that started in November 2016 came to a close in the early morning of 14 June. The...
October 20, 2017
Sweden’s Solar Heat Market on Hold

The IEA Solar Heating and Cooling (SHC) programme has recently updated its country report on Sweden’s solar thermal industry, pointing out the increasing competition with other energy technologies and the factors exacerbating the...
October 17, 2017
EU Renewables Directive Revision Could Give New Impetus to Solar Thermal

The European Parliament is planning to vote on a revised Renewable Energy Directive next February. About 1,300 amendments had been submitted until July 2017 related to the first draft of the revised directive from November 2016 (see attached document). The amendments are currently discussed...