Thursday, September 14, 2006

'State of the art' solar panels for the Great Glass Eyeball.

City Hall's media centre has a puff piece on how the building has "has been given the go ahead for state-of-the-art photovoltaic solar panels to generate non-polluting energy". The breathless prose does not, however, give any indication as to what percentage of the building's electricity will come from these panels, nor, of course, quite how much these 'state of the art' panels actually cost.

Livingstone commented "I hope that other agencies and firms will now start to copy our lead and install solar panels on their own buildings."

Maybe they will, maybe they won't, but one thing is certain: companies will be answerable for the cost of any action of this sort, whereas we Londoners have the pleasure of paying for this exercise in fashionable tokenism. What chance of flushing out the information via a Freedom of Information request?

5 comments:

Anonymous said...

Just read your website.

You really need to get out more and meet girls.

Serf said...

I'll tell my wife that shall I ?

Croydonian said...

I think he was having a go at me Serf. Brought my ego back down to earth, and a laugh at the same time after the fun of the Dale list....

Anonymous said...

Form an energy conservation perspective, it does make sense. I haven't done the economics calculation - I don't have the time to do it now - I'll do that later (unless someone beats me to it).

Off to the pub....!

Croydonian said...

Alan - thank you for that. I suspect we would need to know about the costs before a full calculation could be made.