Residents in the UK are continuing to embrace clean, renewable energy, with an increase in weekly installations of solar panels.
According to the latest installation figures from the Department of Energy and Climate Change (DECC), installations of below 50kW have now hit the 6MW-a-week mark.
For the week ending July 28th, installations of solar PV accounted for a total capacity of 6.1MW, whereas the week ending August 4th saw a small rise to 6.4MW.
However, despite the earlier rise in capacity, the number of installations registered did see a slight decline to 5.5MW for the week ending August 11th.
It is worth noting that lags in the DECC database often means that figures are revised upwards, meaning the totals could be marginally lower than first reported.
For the last three weeks, total installations have reached 1,625, 1,642 and 1,520, which is still someway off the year's record total of 5,866 PV panels installed to the end of June 30th – pushed up by the changing feed-in tariff levels.
The feed-in tariff rate freeze until 2014 has encouraged both the industry and consumers. The average installation per week is still much lower than what was achieved from March to June, when figures stood at 9.7MW a week.
Of the 1,520 installations that were registered last week, some 95 per cent of these were in the 0.4kW category. However, the 4-10kW and 10-50kW tariff bands only saw 36 and 38 arrays installed respectively.
Homeowners looking to install solar technology on their property will not only be able to help the environment, they will reduce their energy bills in the long-term.
Cutting the cost of energy bills will be coupled with money made from selling excess energy back to the National Grid, with money generated through the feed-in tariff.