Nowadays solar panels are familiar, and we see them on many homes, many new houses are now built to include them. However, this hasn’t always been this way, and solar technology has come on leaps and bounds in just 30 years. Once something that was seen as a futuristic thing that very few people had is now available to the majority of people and their homes to generate electricity from a renewable source – the sun.
In 1995, the Oxford Eco house was built – at the time this was a pioneering design that you might expect to see on Tomorrow’s World – one of the things that it had on it was a solar panelled roof, something that could generate power for the home directly from the sun, and something that very few people in the UK had seen before.
Another hurdle was the fact that this technology at the time was way out of reach for most people – photovoltaic panels alone cost around £18,000!
However, during the 2000s, there was more interest and technological advances in renewable energy and companies started to show up to supply solar panels to people’s homes – this really took off around 2010 as the government introduced the feed in tariff, meaning that any excess energy that the solar panels on roofs produced, the owners of them would get paid for by the government by feeding it back into the grid.
With more awareness around solar panels and companies like this Dorset solar panels business https://solarpanelsdorset.co.uk/solar-panels able to install them, more and more people started to use them to generate electricity, and they are now a common sight across the UK with them also being a cheaper from of electricity in times when energy prices can be a concern to many.
