PV market in Germany keeps declining in contrast to the strong demand in the previous years. Across the country, the PV installation capacity in July was only 81.6MW, lower than in June, according to the Federal Network Agency’s data.
The German government offers FiT rates ranging from €0.0853~0.1231/kWh depending on scales and types of PV systems. The government decided to suspend FiT reduction policy in 2015 because the domestic demand started to shrink since that year.
Nonetheless, the suspension of FiT digression can’t sustain the country’s demand to PV systems. The Federal Network Agency’s data showed that 81.628MW of PV systems were installed in July, including 4,999 small-scale systems and three utility-scale projects – the utility-scale projects’ capacities were respectively 3.758MW, 3.362MW, and 206kW, which were all relatively small to conventional ones.
June was the uptick in PV installation in 2016 as 120MW of PV was installed and connected to German grids, bringing the total installation capacity in the first six months of 2016 to 513MW.
PV Magazine reviewed that Germany conducted four tender rounds for large-scale projects from April 2015 to April 2016, awarding 122 bids with a total of 650MW project capacities. However, the Federal Network Agency confirmed that only 17 of the awarded projects, with a capacity of 104MW, had been installed by mid-August, 2016.
EnergyTrend expects that Germany’s PV demand will fall to a stable level of approximately 1GW per year. It is difficult for the country to see another installation boom in the future under the given policy scheme.
