The solar industry is putting forward an emergency rescue plan for British solar which will cost just £1 on bills in 2019 as an alternative to the Government’s proposed cuts to the Feed-in Tariff for the technology. The Solar Trade Association hopes that its ‘£1 solar rescue plan’ will work for both the solar industry and the Government, allowing a viable solar market to continue while giving the Government the cost control guarantees it requires. The £1 plan garnered cross-party support from over 30 MPs from all parties yesterday at an action day outside the House of Commons including Sir David Amess MP (Con), Mims Davies MP (Con), Kevin Hollinrake MP (Con), Caroline Flint MP (Lab), Caroline Lucas MP (Green), Callum McCaig MP (SNP) and Tom Brake MP (Lib Dem). The Government consultation on the changes is set to close tomorrow evening, with a final decision expected later this year. Leonie Greene, Head of External Affairs at the Solar Trade Association said: “This emergency plan represents a compromise agreement which, given the current crisis, aims to find a way forward that is acceptable for both the Government and the solar industry. “The fact that this plan costs just £1 per household shows just how affordable it could be to adopt steady, gradual reductions in support for solar. “Solar is close to grid parity, but it is not there yet. The Government’s 98 per cent cut in the overall budget for solar would derail the industry at the last hurdle and waste the millions of public investment in solar to date.” The STA’s proposal introduces higher tariffs than those proposed by Government, with higher and more flexible caps on the total amount of solar that can be deployed and an improved mechanism to continually bring support levels down. The trade body is asking for a total of £95 million over the next three years, a significant increase on the £7 million the Government is proposing over the same period. The plan would only add an extra £1 per year on average household energy bills from 2019 for new solar deployed over the next three years which would generate enough electricity to power the equivalent of 875,000 homes. Earlier this week utility company Good Energy published a report showing that solar and wind generation is already helping to reduce wholesale electricity costs with a reduction of £1.55billion on power prices in 2014, thereby offsetting much of the cost of supporting the renewable technologies. The proposed cuts have already dealt a heavy blow to investor confidence in the market, with three solar businesses, Mark Group, Climate Energy and Southern Solar, having already gone into administration over the last few weeks making over 1,200 people across the country redundant. American firm Zep Solar has also pulled out of the UK market. The Solar Trade Association has estimated that up to 27,000 jobs in the solar sector and its supply chain could be at risk if the proposed reductions in tariffs go ahead. Like this story? Please subscribe to our free weekly e-newsletter at the top of the page for more content like this. Related content:Green policy Source link

Around 70 labourers and scaffolders at the Glasgow Recycling and Renewable Energy Centre decided to down tools as the latest move in a pay row dating back to last June. The Unite workers claim they are earning up to £5 an hour less than more recently hired workers, who are paid under the National Agreement for the Engineering and Construction Industry pay rates. They say that Interserve first employed them 18 months ago was under the Construction Industry Joint Council nationally agreed pay rates, which can be £4-5 per hour below NAECI wages. Unite say it is taking the action to strike after Interserve on Thursday rejected its calls for pay parity for the workers employed under the CIJC. IInterserve won the contract for the plant in 2013; when completed, will handle 200,000 tonnes of Glasgow’s residual waste every year. Around 300-400 workers are currently working on the site that is expected to be completed later this year. Unite regional officer Stephen Deans said: “What appears to have happened is that Interserve employed the workers going on strike on the CIJC rate. “But the firm and their subcontractors are paying new workers on the site at the higher nationally NAECI agreed rate or greater. “They have had to employ people from across Scotland and even from outside Scotland, so they have had to pay more to attract the travelling workforce. “What we are calling for is pay parity for all workers on the site that has a workforce of between 300 to 400 workers. “We had a meeting with the Interserve management on Thursday and they refused to consider pay parity. ”This is very disappointing.” An Interserve spokeswoman said: “In respect of the GRREC site in Glasgow we are disappointed that industrial action has been called, this is a multi-contractor site where employees are paid the appropriate rates for the associated trades and Interserve is aligned with this policy.”   Source link

The oceans have been around for roughly 4.5 billion years. They cover 70% of the planet, but we have yet to explore 95% of their depths. In a bid to further investigate the wonders of the deep, scientists have recently researched mining rare metals — such as copper, zinc and gold — from volcanic rock on the seabed.    When a winch controlling a high-powered drill broke down on a ship mining samples off the coast of Japan, costing the company over $30,000 a day, the crew called maintenance and repair specialist CP Automation. Here, global business development manager John Mitchell discusses how CP Automation got the application running smoothly under strict time constraints. Due to the location of the mineral rich area off the coast of Japan, sample extraction has to be planned 20 hours in advance, in accordance with how high wave crests were. The rougher the waves, the more the drill moves and the higher the risk of damage to an incredibly expensive piece of equipment.     Just before the company deployed the drill for the first time, faults with the winch began to appear. Onboard engineers found the problem to be a DC BUS overvoltage issue caused by the brake chopper. The engineers attempted to alleviate the problem by replacing the brake chopper like-for-like, but their attempts proved unsuccessful.   After calling a representative from the brake chopper manufacturer, they agreed to fly out as soon as possible. Unfortunately, due to time constraints, this meeting was cancelled, leaving the project losing tens of thousands of dollars every day and those on board no closer to rectifying the problem. By the time the company contacted CP Automation, the drill had been out of action for two weeks and the crew were at wits’ end.   Winch and drill  The winch system controls the deployment of the drill to the seabed, which could be up to 3km from the ship. The winch also provides under tension — keeping the cable taught during payout. The brake chopper unit, rated at 400KW continuous 600A and 600KW, 900A at peak, dissipates the excess DC BUS voltage fed back from the motor. If the winch cannot dump the energy created during this process into the braking resistors because the brake chopper has a fault, then the operator can’t control the cable. This would result in the loss of a drill worth millions of pounds. It was therefore imperative that the brake chopper was reliable before the crew deployed the drill.   Once the drill is in the water, the application provides active heave, compensating for the wave movement by automatically driving the winch in the opposite direction at the same speed to stabilise the drill.  The drill has to remain at a constant height from the sea floor so that it can clamp in position.   Getting on board   Because time was of the essence, CP Automation flew out to Japan as soon as we could. We powered up the application when the boat was docked and the brake chopper exhibited new sets of faults each time we tested. It was difficult to test under working conditions because we were unable to deploy the drill, which would work the winch motors. It was therefore impossible to tell if there were any electrical noise problems, which was our suspicion.   CP Automation removed the existing brake chopper and fitted its own 100KW unit into the system. The fault did not transfer to our product, but reoccurred when we reinstalled the old unit. Because the ship’s crew identified a window when the sea would be calm enough to live test the drill, we were unable to carry out any more tests in dock. Pushing off The new brake choppers CP Automation installed were each a quarter the rating of the original unit. Consequently, we had to limit the max speed of the winch until it was possible to assess the current required during payout and active heave. To fit the two brake choppers, we had to modify the control panel. This required us to split the DC BUS into two, with drives one and two on DC BUS one and drives three and four on BUS two. This provided the system with an element of redundancy it did not have before. There was now the option that, should anything go wrong, the crew could operate the system with only two of the four drives. After more tests in mild waves of 1.4m in height, the brake choppers were pulling 30A max per unit during active heave when the drill was at 750m from the ship. The DC bus level was maintained below 750VDC the whole time, which proved that the replacements were a proficient fix. The client deployed the drill five times throughout the twelve hours and the system ran smoothly every time. As far as we could tell, there were no more issues relating to the brake choppers and the crew were able to extract all the mineral samples necessary.   A shore fix After careful testing, we proved that CP Automation’s brake choppers worked in the drill application because, unlike the original unit, our brake choppers did not use external power controls. This meant they are not susceptible to external noise. The previous brake chopper had no electromagnetic compatibility (EMC) or harmonic filter installed, so the resultant electrical noise from the drill application and those around it, caused the brake chopper to fault.   Scientists, fiction writers and film directors often refer to the oceans as the last frontier because of just how little we know about their depths. Indeed, deep-sea mining is still only in its infancy; scientists predict that minerals could be in abundance under our unexplored seas, albeit difficult to extract. The drilling project CP Automation managed to revive is one of