BP Solar

Perhaps best known as a purveyor of oil and gas, British Petroleum (BP) has been increasingly banking upon the tremendous growth in the renewables sector to position themselves as major energy producers for the 21st century.

Begun very quietly nearly 30 years ago, BP solar technologies and products have been making very steady market gains in recent years. Though still very much an oil-based company in an oil-based economy, a few thousand employees worldwide have been investigating new and innovative technologies since purchasing Lucas Energy Systems in 1980. Just five years later, BP constructed manufacturing plants in Spain and Australia.

Being a very wealthy oil company first and foremost, BP has tremendous resources to invest in the this new technology, though it has taken quite some time for a competitive product to be produced in quantities sufficient to be mass produced and affordable. Between 1985 and 1990 additional manufacturing plants to produce BP solar panels were brought online in Saudi Arabia, India and Indonesia; further emphasising the future potential for profit by making them in oil exporting nations.

Though the closest many people got in the 1980s to BP solar was a pocket calculator, the demand for solar panels, like organic produce, continued to double every few months throughout the 1990s from a very small number to a significant proportion of the overall energy sector today. Solarex, one of the world’s oldest solar manufacturing companies, finally became profitable in the mid 1990s.

In 2000, BP used some of its massive capital to buy US-based Solarex. The new combined company was re-christened BP Solar and the very next year was incorporated into the larger BP corporate strategy. Since then, BP solar home solutions have been a secondary concern to using the former Solarex technologies and manufacturing capacity to create solar power plants across the world.

One of the more innovative products offered by the company are the GCR series of charge regulators. Using rudimentary artificial intelligence, these solar charge regulators actually learn what your usage patterns during the day are and respond by charging your batteries accordingly. The BP solar GCR series usually ships with a user manual and installation instructions, as well as an intuitive LCD display tracking charge variations throughout the day and with as much as month of historical data.

In an effort to increase profitability now, the company has gotten out of the up and coming thin-film solar cell market, focusing instead on large-scale implementations of older and more resource-intensive technologies. However, as soon as another company perfects the process, it is believed that as a leader among petrol companies, BP Solar will once again leap into the fray.