Tuesday, November 3, 2009

Update on solar rates in Germany

Recently, I blogged on how solar rates would be reduced in Germany effective January 1. I stated that they would now be reduced by 11 percent, but that is not true for every type of system -- some will be reduced by nine percent. (Both decreases represent a further reduction.)

The press release from Germany's Network Agency is here (PDF) in German. There is still no translation of that press release, and the agency has not yet responded to my query about whether one will be published in English.

(Update: the Agency says the press release will not be translated.)

One further comment: the press release states that the roughly 1400 megawatts installed from Q4 2008 - Q3 2009 were spread across some 77,000 arrays, putting us at an average arrays size of only 19 kilowatts (the average home rooftop probably only has three or four kilowatts). Clearly, homeowners' small arrays drive the German market.

4 comments:

  1. The BNetzA writes that:
    "Zu beachten ist: Die gemeldete installierte Nennleistung der einzelnen Datenmeldungen ist nicht mit der Gesamtleistung der Anlage gleichzusetzen. Wenn beispielsweise eine Freiflächenanlage Zug um Zug in Betrieb genommen wird, erfolgen die Datenmeldungen an die Bundesnetzagentur in der Regel sukzessive und gehen an verschiedenen Tagen ein, die installierte Nennleistung der gesamten Anlage kann nicht den Listen entnommen werden."

    Did you take care of this within your calculations of average 19 kW?

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  2. No, I just did the simple math - thanks for the tip. So where does one get the official figure for the number of systems?

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  3. Hier gibt es Daten für 2007. Die für 2009 wären natürlich noch interessanter....
    http://www.bundesnetzagentur.de/media/archive/17185.pdf

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  4. Thanks, Flo, but I wonder if that gets us where we want to be. Take a look at the bottom of page 13 (frustratingly, it seems that you cannot copy text out of the PDF). Are you certain that the figures for solar were adjusted, given that the figures for wind might also have been "combined"?

    Anyway, thanks for for your comments -- I will put up a new entry on this important issue.

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