Environmental Building

The petition is entitled Enforce all new house builds to have solar panels on there roof, use gray water for toilet flushing. Make financial provision and enforcement of action for all community and public buildings ( with the exclusion of those that are grade 1 or 2 listed ) to have 90% of there power needs to be supported by solar/wind power and where possible the use of water recycling for toilet and other uses and the explanatory notes say

"Everyone accepts that we need to do something to help obtain electricity in a better way than we do at the moment. Making a start with new builds having solar panels will reduce the need for wind and nuclear power. Including a provision for community and public buildings will help generate excess power than is being used but will also cut costs of publicly run buildings."

Firstly, the confusion between "there" and "their" is making me twitch.

Secondly, this is quite sensible in most respects, I suspect. The biggest problem I'm aware of is that presently solar panels are extremely inefficient and generally, I think, still take more energy to make than they're likely to accumulate in their lifetime. I don't think it's at all practical to require buildings to have 90% of its power needs supported by solar/wind generation - very few buildings are located such that this is possible.

Even if I'm wrong about the energy required to make solar panels, this sort of thing would add significantly to the cost of new builds, which might not be a problem for all of it, but would certainly be a problem in some cases.