Solar boom continues in Germany despite support cuts

FRANKFURT: Germany’s subsidy-backed solar power installations from January through to November 2012 indicate that full-year figures are set to come close to last year’s record, highlighting spiraling costs for consumers.
Figures issued by the country’s energy regulator, the Bundesnetzagentur, at the turn of the year showed January to November 2012 installations rose to nearly 7,300 megawatts (MW) and that November installations alone totaled 435.3 MW compared with 659.3 MW in November 2011.
This shows a likelihood of 2012 matching the previous installation record of 7,500 MW in 2011 and after 7,400 MW in 2010.
The solar boom has been encouraged by generous feed-in tariffs, which are guaranteed to generators for 20 years to encourage carbon free power industries to gradually replace power produced from fossil fuels.
The trend of additions in recent years far exceeds the 2,500 to 3,500 MW the Berlin government had wanted to see each year.
The unusually higher December 2011 installations of 3,000 MW are, however, unlikely to have been reached in December 2012. The surge at the end of 2011 was due to the anticipation of tariff cuts which kicked in at the start of 2012.
Last year, feed-in-tariffs for new solar units were cut by 2.5 percent a month between Nov.1, 2012 and Jan.31, 2013, in response to the strong increase in generating capacity in 2012.
Total solar capacity stood at 32,059 MW at end-November.
The share of renewable subsidies within the overall power bill rose 47 percent on January 1, 2013, to 5.3 cents a kilowatt hour, raising the subsidizing cost per average household by 60 euros ($79.10) to 185 euros for the year.
Private consumers bear the brunt of the costs after the government gave breaks to energy-intensive industry, cutting some of the green energy and network usage costs for companies.
The association of solar producers (BSW) said on Tuesday that its members already supplied eight million households with power, 45 percent more than in 2011, and accounting for five percent of the power usage total.
“Germany now is benefiting from the fruits of its labor in solar technology. Solar’s share in power supply has quadrupled in the last three years,” said BSW managing director Carsten Koernig.
But business daily Frankfurter Allgemeine said the only way for consumers to benefit was to fit their own solar panels, instead of receiving and paying for power from public networks.
“Whoever wants to avoid being milked (for the costs) much longer will have to produce his own power, because politically there is no chance of recourse,” it said in an editorial on Wednesday.
German Environment Minister Peter Altmaier, meanwhile, said his country would never again return to nuclear energy, hitting back at a top EU official who doubted Berlin’s commitment to phase out nuclear power.
“I cannot see any plausible political line-up that would enable a revival of nuclear power in Germany,” Altmaier told the Leipziger Volkszeitung regional daily.
After the 2011 Fukushima disaster in Japan, Germany embarked on an ambitious “energy revolution,” deciding to phase out its nuclear power plants by the end of 2022 and bolster renewable sources of energy such as solar and wind power.
However, concerns have mounted that this would entail a sharp rise in electricity prices amid difficulties in building a network able to transmit energy from the North Sea coast to the energy-hungry south of the country. The European Union’s Energy Commissioner, Guenther Oettinger, told the Rheinische Post regional daily that there would “still be nuclear power on the German network in 40 years.”
He said there were still 140 nuclear power stations in Europe and that nuclear fusion technology was progressing rapidly. “Maybe this technology will one day be accepted in Germany,” said Oettinger, himself German.
Altmaier also vowed to find a permanent national storage site for nuclear waste by 2030.
“We are together looking country-wide,” he said, adding that the search would be accelerated in the coming years.
The search would be “co-financed and jointly carried out” by Germany’s nuclear energy companies, he said.