Supporting Renewable Energy

Part of 1. Questions to the Minister for Climate Change – in the Senedd at 2:21 pm on 11 January 2023.

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Photo of Julie James Julie James Labour 2:21, 11 January 2023

Yes, I was really aware of that. It's a great idea. Obviously, if you travel in Europe at all, you'll notice that car parks have canopies over them anyway, because they're shading the vehicles from the sun. We don’t entirely have that problem in Wales yet. We have the rain problem, absolutely. The old joke about, 'Did you know that you could take your cagoule off when you go to England?’ springs to mind at that point. I’m not sure that we could justify building a canopy in order to put a solar panel on it. But I absolutely take the point that, where there is capacity to put a solar panel on an existing roof, or we're building new, deliberately, we should be doing that.

The whole issue with the grid that we were just discussing comes to play there. What would we do with that energy? If there’s a local use for it, then, okay, that’s fine. But if you are looking to feed it into the grid, then we have all of the issues that we've got. I'm actually very interested in looking to see whether that kind of system would support an EV charging network, even if it was a slow one.

So, there are some things afoot to look at that, and we are very interested in taking that forward. It’s a slightly different landscape to the one in France, but, nevertheless, I'm very interested in the project. And if you're aware of anyone who is interested in taking it forward—local authority-wise or private sector car park-wise—then do let us know, because we are very happy to talk to them.