From Guest Blogger Mathias: Germany`s Solar Capacity Up 50% Since 2011
Even though Germany has recently cut their national feed-in tariff scheme between 20-30 percent from April this year, the solar industry has flourished in the first nine months of 2012.
The nation`s utilities say the capacity of solar power has grown by 50% from January to September in 2012. The total annual capacity has risen to 25,000GWh from 16,500GWh last year.
About a week ago, Reuters reported “nearly 1 gigawatt (GW) of new solar power generating capacity was installed in September alone”, which is a far more than the 2.5 to 3.5 GW a year the German government aims for.
This means that the growth rate of photovoltaics in Germany has never before been higher, and Bundesnetzagentur (the German Federal Network Agency –the regulator of the country`s energy network) has stated that the feed-in tariff scheme will be cut further by 2.5% monthly between November 1, 2012 and January 31, 2013 (Source: Businessweek).
At the current time, 26% of Germany`s electricity demand is supplied by renewable energy sources:
“Solar’s share in German electricity production rose from 4.1 percent to 6.1 percent, while wind power gained slightly to 8.6 percent from 8.0 percent and biomass accounted for almost 6 per cent,” Renew Economy notes.
The United States is still far behind Germany when it comes to solar power. In fact, a recent GTM media study indicates that “Germany installs PV on rooftops ten times faster than the U.S.”
There are currently over 340,000 jobs in the green energy sector in Germany. The annual industry turnover is €8.7 billion ($11.1 billion USD). The country aims to generate 35% of all electricity with renewable sources of energy by 2020.
Mathias writes more about solar panels and their costs at Energy Informative.
The ugly fact is that as the world’s demand for power increases, it will probably be necessary to generate at least 90% of the power from non-CO2 emitting sources to avoid contributing to global warming. We must not ignore the transportation sector either.