Preliminary end of year accounts from Solartwin show that it has an order book of of £1m on 1 January 2009.

“This is a record order book which validates our strategy, despite the slowdown in the construction industry, of investing further in medum to large trade orders in the publicly funded housing and educational sectors.” Said Barry Johnston, MD at Solartwin. Commenting on the tidal wave of sleaze affecting the solar thermal induistry and the way it is regulated, he added:

“The solar thermal industry urgently needs new leadership. First and foremost,  its trade association needs to clean up its act. Deal killing attempts and dirty tricks from several competitors continued unabated despite requests to the Solar Trade Association for better conduct from its its members. Europe’s gold standard for solar panels, Solar Keymark was gained, despite opposition from the Solar Trade Association.

After pussy footing about, we finally went public and published an independent report which stated that conventional solar did not comply with HSE guidance on Legionella bacteria, to which the Solar Trade Assocation ludicrously claimed they operated best practice, which they patently do not, and even claimed to the press that they conducted “extensive tests and research” into the subject, details of which we have been unable to obtain, despite publicly offering a solar panel worth £2500 to anyone who can supply this information!

“Meanwhile the government is in a spin, having already been called in by Europe’s competition regulators, its grants programme is now dreadfully underspent becaquse of mismanagement, its exclusion of innovation, which is compounded by its strange picking-winners approach regarding the award of big contracts. It has even given some of the very people who, for nearly a decade, have been ignoring the HSE’s legionella rules the job of rewriting them in order to save their skins!

And the UK’s monopoly grant accreditation body insists that we must install Legionella noncompliant installations, which we refuse to do in order to get grants. Further messsing up the market, they now threaten to remove from grants listing any installer who even installs one Solartwin in a Legionella-compliant way. Our application to join the European Solar Thermal Industries Federation was blocked by the Solar Trade Association, whom we reported to the Office of Fair Trading who did nothing to stop them.

Turning to 2009 he added: we would like to see another, more reputable, trade body taking over the lead with Government in areas such as solar thermal regulation. I hope that innovation wlll be properly promoted, that out of date solar standards and building regulations will be addressed and that solar grants will be available either to all valid technologies or to none – but not just to those who have the power to blackball smaller competitors with impunity. We look forward to a busy year installing our inherently superior, greener, solar heating technolopgy”