Book review: A guide to solar PV projects in local government and the public sector

A guide to solar PV projects in local government and the public sector

By Stephen Cirrell

At the Salford University conference on Retrofit this year, where eco-housing was discussed, the keynote speaker opened with the line ‘this is all pretty hopeless’ and went on to show slide after slide of horribly steep graphs; basically the message was clear – trying to meet global carbon emissions targets is going to be like climbing the north face of the Eiger (which was also what the graphs looked like). Unless every household and organisation reduces its carbon emissions to practically zero today, according to the conference, we’ll spend the next fifty years spitting into the wind.

I mention this to excuse the fact that I come to this review feeling like the deckchair attendant on the Titanic. My negativity is less about the book than the futile efforts of the author, the readership, and the people signing the cheques. I should also mention that our project, a nascent urban Community Land Trust, has only four houses at this stage, and our efforts at ecological housing provision are currently a fascinating thought experiment rather than real-world acquisition and infrastructure-provision. We’re actually an art project, created as part of Liverpool Biennial by Jeanne Van Heeswijk, so our bookshelf fodder tends to be less practical and more glamorous.

So as a reader my reaction was an unhealthy combination of ‘what’s the point?’ and ‘well, duh, obviously’, tinged with the visual artist’s refrain of ‘it doesn’t LOOK very exciting’. But I would assume that I am far from the target audience. Were I an employee of a local government body or third sector housing provider, paid to implement a solar PV project, I’d need a book like this.

Were I sat at a desk creating a strategy to take my organisation forward into the hellish future of fuel poverty and climate change, it would be comforting to have such clear, well-organised chapters, with easy access introductions and conclusions. The glossary alone is a boon in a sector that seems to need acronyms for everything – although nowhere could I find the answer to the question ‘what does PV stand for?’

The back blurb says that whatever the extent of your prior knowledge of solar PV, the book is an essential guide. That’s true, assuming your prior knowledge extends to knowing that PV stands for photovoltaic. It assumes the reader has a working knowledge of the field, and a network of experts already in place.

That may seem a petty and simplistic criticism, but if we are to truly impact environmental change, community engagement cannot be an afterthought (or as the author puts it, a less important factor), it has to be the driving force for change. Bureaucrats with handbooks cannot engender universal change, and the community organisations – co-ops, grass-roots movements, community centres and allotmenteers –  need accessible, easy to use guides. The post-Big Society Britain is not a nation of clearly-delineated public bodies, but of a ‘public sector’ that is increasingly made up of Joe Public.

• For more info on the book click here