Counting German PV

In an interesting turn of events, SolarServer.de writes that PV journal "Solarthemen" has criticized the way that Germany's Network Agency counts the number of arrays. Most importantly, it seems that some arrays may have been counted twice.

This issue is important because the rates paid for solar are reduced ahead of schedule if a certain threshold for installed capacity is exceeded during a year. Granted, with the ceiling at 1.5 gigawatts and around 2.4 gigawatts actually installed over the past four quarters, the debate is largely academic at the moment -- no one is charging that the Network Agency missed the target by a full 60 percent.

But more pertinently to this blog, the issue makes it even more difficult to calculate the average array size, which is a quite interesting exercise because the German market is largely driven by small distributed rooftop arrays on homes, whereas the US market seems to be focusing on utility-scale arrays in the field.