Governments will need to back their rhetoric on renewable energy and cutting greenhouse gas emissions at last Friday's EU summit with real support for a switch to alternatives such as solar power, according to a leading industry expert.
Jeremy Leggett, who runs Solar Century, Britain's fastest-growing tech company, said the move to boost renewables to 20 per cent of energy use by 2020 had come "not before time, given the environmental imperatives of dealing with climate change and peak oil".
Prior to delivering a public lecture in Dublin tomorrow, he told The Irish Times that people now understood the need to "save energy on all fronts and how much easier it is to get cuts in emissions with a marriage of renewables and energy efficiency".
But Dr Leggett, who was described by Time magazine as "one of the key players in putting the climate issue on the world agenda" as a Greenpeace campaigner, said years of working "on the front line of the renewable energy revolution" had left him frustrated.
"Too many policymakers still don't believe that grown-ups can get their energy other than from big conventional power plants. As a result, support is minimal for efforts to create a microcosm of what the future could be like if we took this issue seriously."
After years of representing Greenpeace at UN climate change summits, Dr Leggett set up Solar Century in 1999. Since then, it has completed more than 500 solar energy installations in the public sector and commercial buildings as well as thousands of homes in Britain.
Its flagship project is the CIS Tower in Manchester, one of Europe's tallest buildings in the 1960s. When it was being refurbished recently, Solar Century clad its service tower with 7,244 solar energy modules that will generate 183,000 kilowatt hours of electricity a year.
The £5.5 million (€8.1 million) solar project is the largest to be carried out in Britain so far and "demonstrates how solar power can be easily incorporated into any building refurbishment".
Solar Century also incorporated custom-made photo-voltaic (PV) panels in the geometrically complex roof structure of a new education and resource centre at the highly-successful Eden Project in Cornwall, where visitors can experience a rainforest in gigantic glasshouses.
Demand from the residential sector for PV panels has been so phenomenal that Britain's monthly grant allocations are taken up within hours.
Connecting Climate Change and Peak Oil, a lecture by Jeremy Leggett, is at 7.30pm tomorrow at the Cultivate Centre, East Essex Street, Temple Bar, Dublin.
