German solar power industry sees need for rapid expansion

The expansion of Germany’s solar power capacity must be accelerated if the country does not want to miss out on one of the global energy transition’s most important trends, the German solar power industry warns in the Erneuerbare Energien magazine. Germany will fail to meet its expansion target for solar PV for the fourth time in a row this year, which will turn the country “from vanguard to loser”, solar PV researcher Volker Quaschning says. An expansion not reaching 2 gigawatt (GW) was likely this year, but Quaschning says 15GW per year was desirable. “We need to stop saying the energy transition is too expensive”, Quaschning says, arguing that cost of climate change mitigation alone amounted to 75 billion euros annually. “Compared to that, a revamp of the energy system for the Energiewende is rather cheap”, he says.

Read the article in German here.

See the CLEW article Auctions bring German solar power price to new record low for more information.