“Let there be light again”

After three years of rapid shrinking and the loss of more than 100,000 jobs, Germany’s solar industry seems to have bottomed out, Franz Hubik writes on Handelsblatt Online. “Although the market has shrunk to a fifth of its original size, it now was at least growing, albeit at a low level”. This signalled a “trend reversal,” Hubik ays. The industry would now “hope for a solar boom 2.0,” which was backed by a year-on-year expansion of 65 percent in the first quarter 2017, he explains. But this time the reason people buy solar panels is not because they receive financial support from the German government. In fact, such support has been drastically cut. “Since the costs of battery storage have fallen by about 40 percent, it becomes increasingly profitable to not feed the electricity coming from the roof into the grid, but instead to store and consume it privately,” Hubik writes.

Read the article in German here.

See the CLEW article Last major German solar cell maker surrenders to Chinese competition for more information.