The draft of the RES law, which was published in December 2011, has never reached the Polish parliament. The government has missed all deadlines that it announced for sending the draft to the legislative for almost two years.  The government announced in June that it would wait with the RES law until the existing Energy Law was amended. "This could happen not earlier than mid-August, so the RES law could be sent to the parliament in September - if at all," Grzegorz Wiśniewski, President of Institute for Renewable Energy, explains. Some market experts, however, have told Solarthermalworld.org that the government had already given up on the RES law and was just waiting for the approval of the European Commission to abandon it. 

Whereas Central Europe’s solar thermal markets keep shrinking, Greek has been very stable in recent years. In the meantime, Southern Europe’s hopeful, however, has attracted domestic competitors from other sectors with a low performance, such as PV wholesalers. Usually, they sell collectors from big domestic OEM manufacturers at a low price. Recently, TV adverts have even begun to promote solar thermal systems at low and fixed costs. “We are talking about a completely new situation, which has made end customers to think a solar water heater costs only that much,” says Panayis Konstantinidis, Managing Director of collector manufacturer Calpak Solar Energy (Cicero Hellas) and since January President of the Greek Solar Industry Association, EBHE.

Sometimes, it takes a while until good ideas are copied. This has been the case with solar/renewable building codes, which were invented in Israel more than 30 years ago. It has just been over the last ten years, however, that this political instrument reached all five continents. Frontrunner in Europe was Spain, which approved the Technical Building Code, CTE, in March 2006. Outside Europe, it was the Australian state of Victoria which, in 2005, implemented the first building standard. In the meantime, the database of solar obligations on solarthermalworld.org has grown further and now includes 24 countries which use one of the various types of solar or renewable building codes.