The world’s biggest furniture retailer, Ikea, has announced that it will sell solar panels at all its British stores with the devices appearing in its branches within the next 10 months.
The retailer said that the plan follows a successful pilot project conducted at its Lakeside store in London’s east end which is now selling at least one PV system every day. The panels that the company intends to stock will be made by the Chinese Hanergy Holding Group Ltd which produces thin-film PV panels. The minimum spend available to consumers will be £5,700 in return for 18 panels with a break-even point of around seven years. The package available to consumers also includes in-store consultation, installation and maintenance.
“We know that our customers want to live more sustainably and we hope working with Hanergy to make solar panels affordable and easily available helps them do just that” said IKEA's head of sustainability in the UK and Ireland, Joanna Yarrow.
So far the British solar market has seen year-on-year growth in installations which rose to a total capacity of 1.7GW in September. Ikea itself has an ambitious clean energy target of at least 70 percent energy from wind and solar by 2015 and 100 percent by 2020.
The company already owns wind farms in a number of European countries and has also begun installing solar panels on its stores, warehouses and factories.
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